Artist: Moby
Label: EMI Records
Release: 2011
Length: 71:39
Rating: 3.5/5
Moby is a hard worker. He’s been putting out records for twenty years, and this year he’s dishing up his tenth studio album. “Destroyed” was recorded, as Moby himself said, mostly at night. Apparently “poor” Moby “suffered” from insomnia on his last tour, so at the strangest hours of the day (read: “the night has its own power”) new Moby music kept coming to life. In the end, you can’t even tell whether that’s a blessing or a curse.
Sound-wise, Moby stays in “Wait For Me” territory on the new album, which packs in as many as fifteen tracks and almost 72 minutes of music. The whole thing can cut both ways, but let’s try to get inside the artist’s head and his musical perception. Dark electronica. Nothing new, or rather a return to the darkness Moby actually emerged from on the scene. Picture this. A big-city hotel room where Moby is staying to unwind after a gig. He’s got a guitar within reach and maybe a little Casio pocket toy. Everyone’s asleep, except Moby. Outside, the neon lights of advertising signs pulse, the street lighting is the only friend of Moby’s who knows no sleep, while the lonely man watches it all through a huge window on the twentieth (plus) floor. An idea flashes by, then two, even three… He grabs a handy bit of musical gear, sings, mumbles a melody line to himself and records the whole lot on his cell phone. That’s roughly how the primitive sketches of the new songs for “Destroyed” came about. And the mood captured in these 72 minutes really is an ambient adventure of drifting in the embrace of the night’s reign, of that typical transcendental, cerebral trance dictated by the levers of Moby’s by now thoroughly proven artistry. Among the “night flashes” on the album, the superb Sevastopol stands out, the ambient high point of the record..
It feels like this time it’s not a proper studio album but a collection of inspired demo recordings that came together on the fly, casually, totally unpretentiously, in a glow of spontaneity driven by the artist’s state of mind, inspiration and openness to “switching off”. Ambient is all you’re left with when you become the guy who runs everything alone with the knobs on the mixing desks and the instruments in the studio. On top of that you invite three tried-and-tested female vocalists, do a few of your own vocals, which you then casually weave into the fabric of the songs so that they, too, work more or less as adapted sound samples of programming. The night took Moby far this time. As things unfold, you can tell that some of the tracks are “stretched out” and don’t have many departures from the basic lead phrase that the sound loops hang on. One of those is, for example, the track just before the end of the album, called Lacrimae, which is stretched to eight minutes yet has no more than a sequence of five notes. It has incredible potential for further development, and with a bit more detail Moby could have gotten a lot more out of it. The same feelings creep in on Victoria Lucas or The Violent Bear It Away. Despite the subtly graded ebb and flow of the ambient as the individual electronic patterns come together, the basic phrase holds a defined form that never changes. So it feels like some tracks could have been wrapped up way earlier than they actually are. The many repetitions of the basic lead phrases especially point that way. Of course, that feeling disappears if you listen to the album on a long night drive in the car. It sounds great. Just don’t turn the heating on, or the cozy warmth might knock you out into a deep sleep behind the wheel.
Considering that Moby is an American musician, his vocabulary is remarkably accessible to more demanding European ears. His music often evokes the moods once delivered, through their landmark works, by some of the greats among the pioneers of electronic music, from Kraftwerk (I could stretch this to krautrock too), Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, Depeche Mode, New Order,… The track Blue Moon even flirts nicely with the look and feel of the “shoegaze” movement of the distant past. Then there’s The Day, which even pulls some cues from the captured soundscape that effectively wraps around Moby’s “alienated, gloomy” vocal, a soundscape of the kind the guitar genius and pioneer Robert Fripp (King Crimson) built back in the day, especially if we recall his touch on parts of David Bowie’s albums “Heroes” and “Scary Monsters”. In short, all of this was born in Europe. And Moby proved long ago that he’s not just a commercial fad but a refined musical artist who offers real tangibility and substance in his own adventurous work, which is totally unburdened by imitating others and expressively independent.
The nocturnal “Destroyed” isn’t the peak of Moby’s career, nor does it crack the top tier of his most striking records, but it still successfully unveils some of the musician’s visions that have so far gone unrealized. His relaxed vibe, his unpretentiousness and his refusal to chase the obligatory hit feel good. At the same time, with all that pedigree of deep relaxation, you’re left with the feeling that with a bit more digging in and filing down the basic forms into more varied and dynamic structures, Moby could have gotten a lot more out of his electronic craftsmanship. From there follows the logical conclusion that, once the basic demo sketches were laid down, the album came together very fast. So this time it’s worth keeping in mind that this is an album to be listened to at night, which is where it hits hardest and most intensely in delivering its sermon through the captured moods. Of course, it’s no breakthrough in Moby’s catalog, but it’s tailor-made for all his devoted fans to date.
Lineup
Moby – programming, guitar, keyboards, vocals, bass guitar, drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Emily Zuzik – vocals on track no. 4
Inyang Bassey – vocals on tracks no. 5., 8. and 11.
Joy Malcolm – vocals on track no. 7.
Anna Maria Friman – vocals on track no. 12
Production
Moby
Track list
1. The Broken Places (4:10)
2. Be The One (3:29)
3. Sevastopol (4:21)
4. The Low Hum (4:13)
5. Rockets (4:47)
6. The Day (4:32)
7. Lie Down in Darkness (4:26)
8. Victoria Lucas (5:55)
9. After (5:30)
10. Blue Moon (3:31)
11. The Right Thing (4:26)
12. Stella Maris (5:14)
13. The Violent Bear It Away (6:50)
14. Lacrimae (8:05)
15. When You Are Old (2:19)
