Destroyed is labelled as Moby's
tenth album, though when Lauren Laverne asked him what he thought
about that during a 6Music interview, he seemed vague, unsure as
to whether this was indeed his tenth album or not; far too polite
to show indifference, he made the comment sound confused, but you
were left with the impression that he really didn't care. In a body
of work that has few stylistic connections to one another, such
a figure is pretty irrelevant; it would only stand out if the Moby
of 'Go' had made ten albums of purely techno / house music, mostly
because most dance acts simply don't normally have the longevity
or abundance of ideas to make 12" records turn into LPs.
The announcement of a new Moby album always makes
you wonder exactly which Moby you're going to hear this time around.
With the advent of Destroyed I couldn't help but feel even
more clueless about the style of music we'd be presented with this
time around. Following Moby's Twitter
feed provides no clues at all. In the run-up to the Destroyed
announcement, Moby was to be found performing in his metal band
Diamondsnake, taking to the stage with Laura
Dawn as a member of The Little Death,
and reforming his first band, the hardcore Vatican Commandos.
Any signal that Moby might be about to release anything new seemed
remote; if anything his tweets seemed to suggest that he was more
comfortable working with others or DJing than making music on his
own again, that he'd almost turned his back on the electronic music
that had initially made him successful.
So the announcement of Destroyed was a
surprise. Like Last Night, Moby has ascribed a vibe to
the album, describing it as 'broken down electronic music for empty
cities at 2am'. It could be a sequel to Last Night's hedonism;
this is where the club-goers of that album's 'night out in NYC'
vibe find themselves when they've been ejected from the club. Most
of the LP was written in hotel rooms while Moby was traversing the
globe, and a sense of icy solitariness does pervade the album's
tracks. When Emily Zuzik sings the line 'I'm in love with this
isolation' on the pulsing 'The Low Hum' you never really know
whether Moby is putting on a brave face amid a life of trawling
from hotel to hotel, or whether he really does love the sense of
lonesomeness that his life affords.
Certainly the album blurs that line between joy
and sorrow more overtly than anything else from Moby's back catalogue.
Only lead single 'The Day' finds itself fully immersed in a miserable
sense of dismay. Something like the warped, subtle electro of the
instrumental opener 'The Broken Places' appears sad but still has
an array of sounds that invoke positive feelings. 'After' is a stand-out
track. Introduced by vocoded vocals from Moby and Inyang Bassey,
the track slowly builds with some gorgeous retro synth sounds and
a muscular beat and string blend not dissimilar to a Bollywood soundtrack,
and has an urgent energy. Moby's fraught vocal seems to be full
of regret and apology. (Having started this review before I saw
the video created by Alberto Gomez for this song at the BFI on 1
June, I now can only associate this with that promo's arty obliqueness.)
The track ends with some brilliant synth noises like fireworks produced
by Kraftwerk. 'The Right Thing' has a muted funk-soul dimension,
like a new take on Marvin Gaye's 'Inner-City Blues', and Bassey's
sensual vocal just adds to the likeness.
One review I read of Destroyed implied
that there was far too much introverted noodling here, as if Moby
had found himself with too much time on his hands during hotel downtime,
thus creating a messy work more for his own needs than the listening
public. I don't feel the same way. I think Destroyed hangs together
really well, despite having the thread of melancholy introspection
laced throughout its tracks. The only time that charge may have
any resonance is on 'The Violent Bear It Away' which sounds like
a familiar cul-de-sac in Moby's instrumental canon, but it's just
a minor dip in an otherwise inventive album. Destroyed,
for me, completes a theme that started less overtly with Hotel
in 2005, perfectly capturing just how much time for reflection and
isolation there is when you do a lot of travelling, and just how
dead the world feels in the early hours.
Destroyed comes in a number of formats,
including as a hardback art book with the CD included. The book
contains copious, erudite notes from Moby about his love of photography,
all in classic Moby lowercase, and pages upon pages of really cool
photos. Some are of crowd shots, some are of tunnels, some are of
airports, some of them are from airport carparks. All of them enforce
the sense of isolation the album takes as its theme. 'I hope that
somehow in these pictures I'm able to convey the mundanity of touring
as juxtaposed with those moments of the disconcerting and/or the
sublime,' he says. My only gripe is that the book doesn't have any
details on the music at all, forcing you to buy an alternative format
or trust Discogs.com for liner notes. Maybe I care about that sort
of stuff too much.
lp/cd/i:
1. The Broken Places
2. Be The One
3. Sevastopol
4. The Low Hum
5. Rockets
6. The Day
7. Lie Down In Darkness
8. Victoria Lucas
9. After
10. Blue Moon
11. The Right Thing
12. Stella Maris
13. The Violent Bear It Away
14. Lacrimae
15. When You Are Old
little idiot [uk] / mute corporation [usa]
| i unknown | 14/02/2011 | track
listing
The three tracks on the Be The One EP are
upbeat in the sense of having 4/4 beats of various tempi, but these
aren't necessarily euphoric songs. 'Victoria Lucas', for example,
has a plaintive quality. Sure, it has the house pianos that made
early Moby tracks like 'Next Is The E' essential,
and of course those synth strings which he can't live without, but
it also includes some ruminative humming and an icy quality that
renders it anything but optimistic. You can dance to these songs,
but you may wonder why you don't feel much like smiling.
'Be The One' starts with a heavily processed Moby
intoning various, slightly bitter, sentences over a web of those
'broken' electronic sounds until a storming guitar and drums rhythm
kicks in, making this a more downbeat take on Hotel's 'Lift
Me Up'. The low end is a grinding, indecipherable throb, the high
end dominated by Moby's processed vocal and muted strings. The track
ends with some pleasant feedback which gives no clues at all to
'Sevastopol's expansive warped electronics. 'Sevastopol' has a sense
of urgency about it, some great synth sounds plus a retro Balearics-friendly
beat; I rather think it sounds like the soundtrack to one of Moby's
frequent mad dashes to airports in the back of taxis to make some
DJ date in LA or London.
little idiot [uk] / mute corporation [usa]
| i unknown | xx/xx/2011 | track
listing
The first single proper from Moby's
Destroyed (the free Be The One EP reviewed above,
it seems, doesn't count) is a thoroughly miserable affair. Over
squeaky, wobbly synths, mournful guitar, strings and almost-there
beats, Moby sings a sad tale of someone suffering with some sort
of terminal illness; the chorus has a strident, reassuring, confident
quality containing the types of words people who are suffering want
to hear, whether they are true or not and whether the person saying
them really believes what he's saying. It's a bit like Moby singing
'It's going to be okay,' over and over, without really
knowing if that's the case or not. It could do with a bit more of
a weighty beat on the chorus if you ask me, but it's moving nonetheless.
The poignancy of the track is reinforced by the
video, showing Moby lying flat on a hospital floor (helpless?) while
an angel (Heather Graham) battles the suffering valiantly patient's
demonic illness with a sword; at the end it's not clear whether
the defeat of the demon means the woman will live or if Graham's
efforts have ended the woman's suffering and allowed her to rest
in peace. I've included the video below, but don't expect to watch
it without shuddering.
I gather there are remixes available at Beatport,
but I haven't spent much time looking around for those. There was
a free Yeasayer remix that Mute
and Moby both sent around, which I do have. That mix showcases Yeasayer's
unique take on electronic music, weaving droning textures, subtle
drums and spiralling synth patterns around Moby's vocal. It has
a prettier vibe than the more maudlin Moby original, but Yeasayer
have a history of producing bittersweet pop, hence the juxtaposition
of relatively 'optimistic' sounds with a bleak vocal is business
as usual for these guys. Moby's vocal does seem a little otherworldly,
like it was tacked on as an afterthought, but I'll overlook that.
Moby also sent round a free orchestral instrumental
version, wherein what sound like 'real' strings weave around Moby's
more usual synth pads; Moby has a history of producing such beautifully
moving instrumentals and this serves as a reminder of the bonus
CD that came with early versions of Animal Rights. Well worth downloading
if you want to feel even more miserable than you probably do already.
The 'sleeve' image for 'The Day' is taken from the
Destroyed book. In his notes Moby advises that the shot
is of 'London. Actually, maybe it's Switzerland. Or Paris. I don't
actually remember. I like tunnels.'
