græ - moses sumney
well after having a nice introspective escapade to my bedroom bed for about a month i am back and resurfacing with a review again: moses' græ, a double album made by
the all encompassing plural sexyness that is sumney.
for starters, i think one of my very first 10/10s was moses' original lp, aromanticism
originally listening to it as a 15 year old that browsed /mu/ and got all their music from the sharethreads there (honestly quite a good way to get music (when it was
more popular at least, but the archives still hold some good threads)), listening to the album in my grandpa's visitors bedroom with the ocean sounds as background,
or while walking next to the coast, listening to moses' majestic voice really gave me the chills, and a lot of the songs' ideas about love really motivated me to
research the complex topic of love as i'm still doing today, thusly this first album really broke me up and set the bar too high for any other sumney album, so i didn't
even try to dissect the new album.
to drive the point home, i didn't even listen to the second half of the double album only until about a month ago... but it was really for the best.
græ (for me) is an album centered about, well it's about a lot of stuff, it's about gender, and how it can only be worse for us, it's about c⋅vℓd, and exclusion, it's about
definitions and the problem with definitions, about racism, about love, about various types of love again, all in a sweet package about the separation between humans,
and as so, at a first listen, i didn't really understand it, i thought it was cool for some songs like virile, and cut me, and polly, but didn't understand all these other
songs like insula, or in bloom, or, more importantly, neither/nor (i'll get to that in a sec), and by gød i didn't even listen to much to the lyrics, i just listened.
but given time i started actually understanding the music, first with understanding little by little the ideas of polyamory and masculinity (or lack there of), then with
etymology and definitions in general, then with fles-ħαr₥, then with gender fluidity, i started understanding more bits of the album and started researching the lyrics,
finding their meaning, and vibing with the album more and more. it kinda began shaping me as i was shaping myself
yesterday i told my parnter that i am starting to feel gender fluid myself, that is, i sometimes feel like a he, other times as a she, but most of the time an inbetween of
plurality or neutrality of the they, i enjoy not being associated with such a thing as my gender, and while that was happening, neither/nor started playing in the background
and they embraced me, both the music and my partner understood my feelings and reciprocrated embracing me in a way that cannot be described, that moment was a real changing
moment in myself, and listening to it again, i can understand why i haven't given it a second chance up until now, the album is (in my opinion) for people that understand
that despair of not fitting into a box, that isolation of wanting something bigger, not being part of the conveyor, of not subduing to masculinity or femeninity, it is for
people in that transition, and i just didn't find it at the right time.
but then came the second half, and i didn't understand it from the get-go, i still don't, but i can see it as moses' retreat to their emotional being, that is made quite obvious
by the momentum of the album, it only starts with the up hill that are insula cut me, in bloom and virile, all as show for the listener to understand, these are not only feelings
but developed thoughts and they are trying to show you what they think, and after that we can see the mechanicity of moses as they work their "thesis-like" motif of explaining,
we get to conveyor, boxes, gagarin, jill/jack. and then, tired, moses finally retracts, they cannot be mechanical, and they cannot not explain without love, and they show their
emotions again, colouour i can only feel to be the acceptance of moses' inner love, like an all loving entity they embrace, and while in this emotional driven moment, they finally
open up, in an entirely androgynous voice, they drive the point that was talked in virile, conveyor, boxes, jill/jack, moses explains their plurality and opens themselves even more
with songs like neither/nor and polly preparing the listener for the second half...
and i did just use the last paragraph to explain the first half of the album when i said i'd talk about the second, but really, the first half is but a dent of moses' emotionality
as the second half starts with two dogs, and i've never heard such a gruesome song in my life really, at least not one that talked so calmly about what two dogs talks about, which
can be a lot of things, but only really sets the second half up for moses to lay out their inner thoughts more acutely, with two dogs, me in 20 years, keeps me alive, and so i come to
isolation, all describing important things moses has lived and will live through and what that means in context with all that is spoken in the first half, it is a closer look to
moses' mind that anything else i've ever listened from them.
really i'm still at a dilemma of what to consider of the album, if i only consider the first half i can easily say it's one of the most important piece of music of all this year so far
but if i consider it as a two-part album, i can only consider it as someone else's most important thing, it cannot be mine as i don't think those thoughts and i will never feel those
feelings, really they are all moses'. such difference between one half and the other makes it really hard to review and classify it onto something (much more to give it a single,
numerical or not, calification) so i can only say that: for the first part, i loved the introspection but openness of moses' ideas, and they really helped me form an idea of who i am
and for the second part i can only hope that moses keeps making more plurally individual music even if most people don't like it, having listened to a lot of their live shows i can
see a sort of fear that restrains moses from singing any of these songs, maybe they'll sing me in 20 years but most definitely never sing bless me or bystanders, because they are
personal songs, only released to form a cohesion of thoughts that were all piling up in moses' head. i hope they play those songs a lil' more in the future