Moses Sumney - Grae - Import 2 LP Record

Credits:

Moses Sumney

Description:

If Aromanticism was an exercise in gently unfurling intimacy, then grae is one in external flair. Scored by Sumney’s most vibrant array of instrumentals to date, the San Bernardino musician’s second set sees him push outward, swapping Aromanticism’s insular fragments for a set of more exposed, yet transient brushstrokes. While Aromanticism’s titular focus was concretely conceptual, on grae Sumney gives us something a little less fixed. Here we go into the Grae, proclaims the warped voice of writer Ayesha K. Faines on opener insula, casting Sumney’s second work into the abyss between black-and-white. His poignant self-actualization is told in these grae intangible spaces: love and pain swirl around one another on Cut Me, polyamory and jealousy mingle on Polly, and platonic spaces spill over into romance on In Bloom. While Aromanticism’s vulnerability is present, it’s matched with declarations of self-worth: Just because you didnt love me/The way I thought I should be loved/Doesnt mean I wasnt wanted opens the gentle ballad Lucky Me, placing a self-assured shimmer underneath grae’s probing. Sumney’s manifesto here -- I insist on my right to be multiple -- is clearer than ever. While heart-breaking in their candor, the musician’s narratives on Neither/Nor and Bystanders champion an unpolluted form of identity, held to one’s chest even when declared a breach of decree. Through the epic double-album format, we see every aspect of this image, from the coy norm-warping of jill/jack to the tempestuous You want to slip right in? Amp up the masculine? You’ve got the wrong idea, son of Virile. The execution is just as bold as the vision. With its words bound by multiplicity, it’s only fitting that grae makes itself sonically uncategorizable. Shifting from pounding rock to experimental jazz at a feather’s touch, the album’s sonics provide the theatrical soundscape to Sumney’s words, rising and falling in line with his crystalline tones. Flakes of Aromanticism return, too, hovering in the project’s most tender moments before dissipating amidst grae’s more dramatic ideas. Yet the intimate spaces still prove to be the most stunning; stranded amid a tide of Bon Iver-esque plucks, Sumney sounds transcendent on Polly, probing his lover’s needs with the crushing Are you dancing with me? Or just merely dancing? Arguably, grae ends on its most despondent note. The hollow characters of closer before you go are caught in a perpetual loop of questioning: What does it mean to be in love? poses one voice, another the aching. Yet perhaps the album’s final moments are as freeing as they are fragile: for Sumney, tumbling between the raptures of both aromanticism and romantic love, the nameless can be just as powerful as the defined. ~ David Crone