Artist: Moby
Label: Dallas Records
Release: 2009
Length: 52:06
Rating: 3.5/5
The accusations that he’d handed his music over to advertisers (and commercial interests) and become a puppet in the machinery of the music industry have finally evaporated. At the start of last summer, Moby launched his ninth studio album, Wait For Me, onto the scene, a collection of sixteen deeply personal, confessional tracks born in the shelter of his own home. Fed up with studios big and small, Moby recorded and produced the entire album himself, with Ken Thomas, also known as Sigur Ros, lending a hand on the instrumental side. The record, an innocent expression of musical creativity free from the pressure of the market and money, draws its inspiration from David Lynch’s speech at the British BAFTA awards.
But this isn’t their first collaboration. The Moby – Lynch story goes back to the early nineties, when Moby’s track Go, from his self-titled debut album, showed up in Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. Almost a decade later the partnership bore fruit again, when Lynch directed the video for Shot in the Back of the Head, the first single from Moby’s latest full-length.
The bald little guy Richard Melville Hall, who took his nickname from the great white whale Moby Dick (Herman Melville, author of that famous bestseller, is a distant relative of Moby’s), got into music in his early years, learning electric guitar and music theory, and later classical guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. This so-called experimental innovator played in the punk hardcore band The Vatican Commandos in the early eighties, and later in the post-punk outfit AWOL, which named the legendary Joy Division as its role models. But that kind of music-making lasted barely a decade. In the early nineties Moby turned to electronic music instead, and since then he’s racked up a string of collaborations, with the likes of David Bowie, Metallica, Britney Spears, Beastie Boys and Public Enemy. Besides some of those, he’s also shared the stage with Lou Reed, Bono (U2), Slash (Guns`n`Roses, Velvet Revolver) and Michael Stipe (R. E. M.). None of that is all that surprising, since his older albums are considerably heavier than the latest one, where Moby comes across as a spiritual artist and where his modesty shines through.
Wait for me opens with the two-minute, almost cinematic instrumental Division, which leads into a calm, flowing rest of the album. Without any big departures, Pale Horses comes next, with Amelia Zirin Brown, an old acquaintance of Moby’s and the choreographer for the New York, New York (2006) video, lending her vocals as the first guest singer. Then comes Shot in the Back of the Head, the first official single from this record, which surprises with a slightly more prominent synthesizer, wailing slide guitars and a repetitive drum rhythm. Study War is enriched by the excellent guest vocals of an undiscovered Black gem, Starr Blackshere, blended with piano and Moby’s words “the battle will be over“. And so it is. The absolute win on Walk with Me goes to Leela James, another Black singer, whose voice at moments recalls the grandmother of rock’n’roll, Tina Turner. Into Mistake, perhaps Moby’s most eloquent track, you’re led by a minute-long “buzzing” of Stock Radio.
Right at the halfway point of the record sits Scream Pilots, followed by another instrumental piece of art, JLTF – 1 and the vocal version JLTF, where Melody Zimmer rattles off a handful of sentences. A Seated Night surprises with an angelic, choral touch, and guest vocals return on Wait for Me, this time from Kelli Scarr, who accompanied Moby on his promo tour of the USA. Among this colorful lineup of female singers, jazz vocalist Hilary Gardner signs off last, on Hope is Gone.
Even though Wait for Me is a gloomier, more personal, confessional album, closed out by the instrumental trio Ghost Return – Slow Light – Isolate, there are no big detours on it. It’s a melodic whole of sixteen tracks that will satisfy even the pickiest listeners and his devoted fans.
Lineup
Moby – all instruments, loops and programming
Production
Moby
Tracklist
1. Division (1:56)
2. Pale Horses (3:37)
3. Shot in the Back of the Head (3:15)
4. Study War(4:18)
5. Walk with Me (4:01)
6. Stock Radio (0:45)
7. Mistake (3:47)
8. Scream Pilots (2:48)
9. jltf-1 (1:27)
10. jltf (4:40)
11. A Seated Night (3:23)
12. Wait for Me (4:13)
13. Hope Is Gone (3:30)
14. Ghost Return (2:38)
15. Slow Light (4:00)
16. Isolate (3:28)
