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”
