Doubling it on sax and guitar, they stuck in tight unison to the line while Sumney conducted the entire phrase with his back to the audience.
Playing the song in Williamsburg, Gendel and Haldeman re-created a flute figure heard at the close of the recorded version. Sumney breaks them up with the Badu sense of loose bump, words falling where they fall, then caught and reshelved at the last second. “Make Out in My Car” is a brief for low-impact sexuality: “I’m not trying to go to bed with you, I just wanna make out in my car.” Those are the lyrics, in full. Sumney can move through moods quickly and without much fuss. The result sounded like a singer of equal capacity opening up the song rather than worrying about his distance from the original. Sumney didn’t approach it with any of Björk’s vocal colorations, choosing instead to melt the lyric and blend it with his wordless threads.
Live, a cover of Björk’s “Come to Me” stayed faithful to the song’s original form but tightened the motif, moving the feel from Nineties trip-hop to a cabaret vamp. His touchstones - Radiohead, Nina Simone, Prince, jazz fusion, Erykah Badu, Björk - would slow down a lesser talent. It is the ballad as invocation, the quiet storm as safe place, the implicit as explicit. He creates personal music shaved of all sharp points, immersed in emotional candy paint, and reduced on a low flame. He’s played guitar in Karen O’s band and performed on Solange’s A Seat at the Table, which is a decent indication of his blast radius, though not of his style. Sumney began in San Bernardino, California did a six-year stint in Ghana, where his parents are from and then returned to California. Sumney bleeds this stuff, breathes it, gives it. Songs that I was fond of became quick favorites, and moves that felt showy on a recording became irrepressible onstage.
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It has been a long time since I relaxed so quickly at a show, that I got the sense someone didn’t just make a great album but knew how to inhabit himself and keep the crowd in mind. And Sumney, for all the sacred heat coming off the songs, is a charming and self-possessed master of ceremonies.
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What is seductive on record becomes a full summoning in person. That voice is his building block, which he turns into choirs with pedals. Sumney has no use for drums, mostly, and leads with a warm falsetto that runs right next to Thom Yorke’s. Sumney’s debut full-length, Aromanticism, is gentle and intense music, an album of voice and everything that doesn’t interfere with that voice. The crowd went bananas, a sign and a validation. What sounded vaguely sweet at first became a mammalian cry, a deep keen. Without any kind of timekeeping, a few minutes buckled and we were inside his head, full of wind and bright reflections. Those words, like any that Sumney sang, came second after the rush of his voice. In the middle of this harmonizing, the words “imagine feeling free” were triggered, or whispered. He began singing wordless pitches and swoops, looping them with equipment mounted on a chest-high stand. Sumney descended in a black tunic and black skirt, regal and calmly smiling. His two band mates, Sam Gendel and Mike Haldeman, were playing the cloudy intro of “Self-Help Tape,” a blend of guitar arpeggios, bass hums, and a world of echo. On Wednesday, October 11, Moses Sumney took the stage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg shortly after 10 p.m.
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