{"id":154649,"date":"2018-02-27T23:07:33","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T04:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=154649"},"modified":"2018-02-27T23:07:33","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T04:07:33","slug":"review-moby-returns-to-his-moody-trip-hop-best-on-new-cd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/02\/27\/review-moby-returns-to-his-moody-trip-hop-best-on-new-cd\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Moby returns to his moody, trip hop best on new CD"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"FILE:<\/a>
FILE: American musician, DJ, record producer, singer, songwriter, photographer and animal rights activist, Richard Melville Hall better known as Moby (Photo<\/a>: Moby\/Facebook<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Moby is done screaming. He’s back to brooding \u2014 \u00a0magnificently.<\/p>\n

The musician-producer’s 12-track \u201cEverything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt\u201d returns us to the orchestral trip-hop he’s famous for following two politically-charged albums of virtual punk.<\/p>\n

The album signals he’s post-anger, as if he’s entered a stage of profound grief. Many songs offer a fragile and melancholy Moby whispering about human fragility over velvet swells of ambient, orchestral sounds punctuated by drum loops.<\/p>\n

The titles alone seem to suggest we’re in for a bleak affair \u2014 \u00a0\u201cThe Sorrow Tree,\u201d \u201cA Dark Cloud Is Coming,\u201d \u201cThe Last of Goodbyes\u201d and \u201cThe Tired and The Hurt\u201d \u2014 \u00a0but the music is gorgeously gloomy without being depressing. That’s hard to do on an album that mentions darkness 15 times.<\/p>\n

For the past few years, Moby raged against Donald Trump in \u201cMore Fast Songs About the Apocalypse\u201d and \u201cThese Systems are Failing.\u201d Now he’s turned his attention at our souls, referencing W.B. Yeats’ poem \u201cThe Second Coming\u201d and borrowing the new album’s name from Kurt Vonnegut’s \u201cSlaughterhouse-Five.\u201d<\/p>\n

He’s added female voices for every song, including five with Mindy Jones, two with Julie Mintz and three with Apollo Jane. They soar while Moby stays grounded and morose. \u201cI can’t see, I can’t speak, I can’t walk, I can’t talk\/But I can see how it’s falling apart,\u201d he half sings in one song.<\/p>\n

The album starts out strong with the driving \u201cMere Anarchy\u201d and the coolly funky \u201cThe Waste of Suns\u201d before hitting a peak with a spacy reworking of the spiritual \u201cLike a Motherless Child.\u201d<\/p>\n

It loses some momentum amid moments of self-indulgence, like when Moby sounds more like Enya with \u201cThe Last of Goodbyes\u201d or when his overinvolved monologues veer into him resembling a bad hypnotist in \u201cThe Middle Is Gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the album ends with a brilliant flourish with \u201cA Dark Cloud Is Coming,\u201d reminding everyone he is a master at creating hypnotic soundscapes. One thing is clear: In Trump’s America, Moby may be beaten but he’s not broken.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moby is done screaming. He’s back to brooding \u2014 \u00a0magnificently. The musician-producer’s 12-track \u201cEverything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt\u201d returns …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":154653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[47389],"class_list":["post-154649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-moby","mauthors-mark-kennedy","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}