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album // Wait For Me
Moby, I have decided, is someone
that I’d quite like to have as a friend. He seems like a really
nice guy and I admire his self-deprecation despite his considerable
success. Most of that true success has come from the album Play
and pushed Moby into a spotlight that couldn’t be further
from his early dance floor-only tracks; he went from being a force
on the techno underground (the purported ‘vegan Christian
nutter’) to a commercial success, and with that fame came
inevitable pressure. 18 was a good album, but it was Play
Part 2; Hotel, a fine, eclectic album, was derided for
precisely not being a derivative carbon copy of Play. Last
Night on the other hand, was a return to the dance floor for
Moby and was hailed by many as a return to form.
For Wait For Me, it would appear
that Moby has decided to move forward again, this time without the
help of Mute Records, his label home since 1992. Wait
For Me is released on his own Little Idiot label and
marks a move away from some of those commercial pressures which
would have informed previous releases. Moby has described this as
a highly ‘personal’ album and it does have a very low-key,
introverted feel to it. The sleeve is adorned with his inchoate
caricatures of himself and doesn’t have the gloss or sheen
of presentation that his packaging is generally known for.
That’s not to say that this is
an album designed to turn fans off. Far from it – all the
classic Moby elements are there, namely the use of held string tones,
melancholy pianos, moving female vocals and depressing song titles
(‘Mistake’, ‘Hope Is Gone’, ‘Isolate’
and ‘Shot In The Back Of The Head’). The gospel-samples-over-breaks
that so characterised Play and 18 make a brief reappearance
on ‘Study War’ too, and even for the most casual fan
it's a highly accessible album. What’s perhaps missing is
some of the 4/4 instrumental techno which he was originally heralded
for and which has consistently made fleeting appearances on later
albums, and the jump from the hedonistic blur of Last Night
to this more laidback offering could be seen as quite stark. Moby
himself, as a vocalist, is also absent on all but one track, preferring
instead to deploy various other singers on a smattering of songs;
otherwise this is largely an instrumental album.
Just because it’s quite different
from the tracks elsewhere on the album, the track ‘Mistake’
(the one track with Moby’s singing and guitars as the main
instrument) is something of a standout. At first I thought the vocalist
wasn’t Moby but David Bowie (he’s Moby’s neighbour,
so it made a degree of sense), and it finally made me find a connection
between Bowie and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis (both he and Moby
were / are Bowie fans), with Moby sat right in the middle. It’s
a thoroughly miserable song overall, but I think it’s great.
Wait For Me is well worth buying just for this song. The
miniature track ‘Isolate’ too has a stunning and quite
captivating brevity, like how you could imagine Erik Satie rewriting
his Gymnopedies with synths and drum machines.
For all its claims to be a more reflective
work, without some of the production polish that has adorned previous
albums, overall Wait For Me is remarkably consistent with the overall
Moby body of work; it just feels like a lowercase statement rather
than a bold, new direction. If I had to sum it up I’d say
it has the feel of one of the meditative bonus CD albums that came
with Everything Is Wrong or Animal Rights interlaced
with unobtrusive beats. I really like it.
A limited edition version of the album
is available, containing a four track CD with three mixes of the
single ‘Pale Horses’ and a reprise of ‘Walk With
Me’.
CD:
1. Division
2. Pale Horses
3. Shot In The Back Of The Head
4. Study War
5. Walk With Me
6. Stock Radio
7. Mistake
8. Scream Pilots
9. jltf-1
10. jltf
11. A Seated Night
12. Wait For Me
13. Hope Is Gone
14. Ghost Return
15. Slow Light
16. Isolate
single // Pale Horses
Review forthcoming.
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