Moses Sumney is still working on the full-length follow-up to last year's phenomenal Aromanticism, but he's blessing us with new music in the interim anyhow.
A couple weeks back, when we learned Sumney's next LP would be a "maximalist" affair because "sometimes you just need to scream," he also revealed he had a noisy new EP coming out imminently. A few days later we learned the EP would be called Black In Deep Red, 2014, and we heard its riotous closing track "Rank & File." And now the full three-song set has arrived.
Sumney has said Black In Deep Red, 2014 -- named for a Mark Rothko painting -- is about questions such as "Do we have power?" and "Who has power?" and "What is the nature of power?" It was inspired by Sumney's attendance at a rally protesting the lack of legal consequences for the cop who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. You can hear a sampled chant from the event on opening track, "Power?"
In a statement accompanying the EP announce, Sumney explained, "I felt like a camouflaged outsider at the protest, like an anthropologist performing a study among his own kind. I took to the mountains soon after that and wrote these songs, wondering if power was a transferable device that could change hands through the vocalizing of unrest." So keep that in mind as you listen to the EP below.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bzug6H3VQ8A
Black In Deep Red, 2014 is out now on Jagjaguwar.
