"'Live From Blackalachia' is a wild imagining of what can happen when we seek not just to reclaim nature, but to re-integrate with it" - Moses Sumney says introducing his new live album recorded in the Appalachian mountains over the course of two days of summer. 'Blackalachia' covers songs from across Sumney's discography backed by a full band.
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble 'Soon It Will Be Fire' features Moses Sumney, a nearly sacral piece; UK rapper Berwyn offers a lovely hip-hop ballad 'Rubber Bands'; The Mountain Goats share superbly titled 'The Slow Parts On Death Metal Albums'; Hazel English fulfilled her dream - she moved to California and covered 'California Dreamin'', a way too pretty song and a way to nice a cover not to pick it out; AKAI SOLO and Navy Blue share psychedelic rap 'Ocean Hue Hours'; Resynator is a documentary about "a daughter connecting with her late father through the resurrection of a synthesizer from the 1970s that he invented", featuring The National's Matt Berninger and Ronboy doing 'Only a Broken Heart'; The Pleasure Dome share noisy punk 'Pretty Picture'; Wolf Alice keep on promising - 'No Hard Feelings' comes ahead of their new album, out in June; Shannon Lay goes in the best classic singer-songwriter direction with 'Rare To Wake'.
Moses Sumney made a stellar short show at the digital edition of Planet Afropunk with reinterpretations of four songs from this year's album 'Græ' and his debut project 'Aromanticism'. Sumney starts on the rear of a truck with his band projected on the back, to continue with an in-nature performance, and finishing with darkness. A much bigger emphasis on the sonics here. Awesome!
Moses Sumney released 'Monumental', his interpretation of 'Olympic Hymn', accompanied by a stunning black and white video starring and directed by Sumney, featuring the musician singing the song on a pedestal like a marble statue come to life; Idles make a slight turn - release s tense psych-ballad 'A Hymn'; free jazz collective Standing On The Corner shared ‘G-E-T-O-U-T!! The Ghetto’ featuring a seven-year-old vocalist Annalise Chanel Renee Williams; Kanye West, again, has a good song - 'Donda', dedicated to his mother; King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard shared a ballad 'Honey'; 'Order' by Zen Mother is just some mighty electro industrial; Helena Deland's 'Lylz' is about the "aching forever-after of female friendship"; Arcade Fire's Will Butler released his new, solo, uplifting song 'Surrender'; Makaya McCraven's 'Strangers in the City' is groovy and tribal jazz.
"His songs don’t settle into familiar shapes or patterns. He sings in a scratchy falsetto that seems to fray at the edges" - Stereogum argues in favor of Moses Sumney's 'Grae' (part two is out this week, part one came out in February). Sumney recruited dozens of collaborators for the album - Adult Jazz, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, James Blake, Jill Scott, Yvette, bass virtuoso Thundercat, Son Lux drummer Ian Chang, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin - in "a time-honored method for creative visionaries seeking to tease out different sides of themselves". Treblezine says it's "the perfect culmination of its transcendent first half", and Guardian rounds it up - "places the Ghanaian-American’s vast emotional range and unfurling musicality front and centre".
Moses Sumney directed a video for his new single 'Cut Me', where he and dancers Emara Jackson and Malachi Middleton evocatively move through a landscape of hospitals, ambulances, and funeral homes. Moses calls the visual “a satirization of the medical industrial complex, and a chuckle in the face of black death”.
Indie singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, pop-punk bandleader Hayley Williams, and country duo Maddie & Tae are dropping their new albums in two or more multi-song installments, divided by months. “All of this comes down to streaming” - one indie label campaign manager explained. Nick Blandford, Sumney's publisher, said - “attention spans are short. We can’t change that. But we wanted to try and play with it a bit”. MusicWatch managing director Russ Crupnick is completely practical about it - “every study we do around social says the No. 1 thing fans want to hear about is new releases from their artists”.
"A hypnotic songwriter, guitarist, and producer with a glassy falsetto and an immense vocal range, he exposes unlikely connections between pop and experimental, with songs that are rooted in knotty emotions" - Pitchfork writes in a long read about Moses Sumney, who is releasing his double album 'græ' May 15. The title "acts as a one-word summary. His interpretation of greyness is not just the kind of cloudiness that sometimes marks his temperament, but the kind that rejects binaries, that asserts that life is not lived in blacks or whites but in the gloriously complex in-betweens"
Some great songs today: Moses Sumney takes a sweet spot somewhere between soul, folk and electro on 'Conveyor', latest song from his double debut album 'græ'; Bat for Lashes plays a stripped-down cover of 'The Boys Of Summer'; free jazz meets afro-pop on 'No Mas' by Irreversible Entanglements: just a nice dream-pop song 'The Absence of Bird' by the Swedes The Radio Dept; some original gangsta rap on 'The Ruler' by Drakeo; the Voidz continue to have fun + be cool + avoid getting ridiculous on two new songs - 'Russian Coney Island' and 'All the Same'; simple and fun video for '3 Tearz' by Danny Brown and Run the Jewels; Swedish dream-pop artist I Break Horses go ethereal on 'Death Engine'; Makaya McCraven’s dreamy reimagining of Gil Scott-Heron’s 'I’m New Here'; Basia Bulat made 'Already Forgiven' based on the sound of strong wind; James Elkington plays lush orch-pop on 'Nowhere Time'; the Colombian-Canadian singer Lido Pimienta goes latin-synth pop on 'Eso qeu tu haces'; KennyHoopla is halfway between Bloc Party and A-ha in his 'how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?//' video; Spanish quartet Melenas play disco shoegaze on '3 Segundos'; Indonesian solo sympho-black metal project Pure Wrath is seeking truth and peace at 'Children of the Homeland'. Plenty of songs, dedicate an hour to listen to all of it...
Moses Sumney released a new song 'Polly', second single from his upcoming double album 'græ'. The first half of that album is coming out in February, second half in May. 'Polly' is the closing track to the first half of 'græ', a simple acoustic love song, accompanied by a one-take video with plenty of tears... Watch […]
Caspian stay on the well-known post-rock path 'Flowers Of Light', but it's stilly just pleasing music; Moses Sumney is something totally different on 'Virile' - modern take on folk-soul, he directed the video himself (watch below); Trail of Dead decided to make pop-song music - 'Don't Look Down' is such; Modest Mouse seem young and […]
