Moses Sumney’s song “Worth It,” on Lamentations, is some of the most experimental soul music of its day; a melding of bizarre falsetto singing and grandiloquent instrumentals. What makes his music soulful is mostly the honesty of his music, and its subject matter (hurt, love).
It screams: this is me, or us, and that we are very different but musical. He chooses to sing in a falsetto that seems to be a direct descendant of D’Angelo’s from Black Messiah, though his is much more processed, ditching cohesive crooning. The remainder of Lamentations is even more experimental than “Worth It.”
Moses Sumney’s song “Worth It,” on Lamentations, is some of the most experimental soul music of its day; a melding of bizarre falsetto singing and grandiloquent instrumentals. What makes his music soulful is mostly the honesty of his music, and its subject matter (hurt, love).
It screams: this is me, or us, and that we are very different but musical. He chooses to sing in a falsetto that seems to be a direct descendant of D’Angelo’s from Black Messiah, though his is much more processed, ditching cohesive crooning. The remainder of Lamentations is even more experimental than “Worth It.”
His music bears a striking resemblance to the Hip Hop and R&B of its day: The Weeknd’s and Kanye West’s, for example. As R&B and Hip Hop have too melded indie pop music to themselves for very popular releases, such as Beyonce’s Lemonade, is this Sumney’s a sound of soul to come? It might be a prelude to at least some of it: that of a generation eager to express its individualities, as it does when it wears its hair natural along with a bullring and demands societal change as much it consumes commercial Hip Hop.
By Emmanuel Adolf Alzuphar
Moses Sumney – “Worth It”