Moby
Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt

Moby reaches his fifteenth studio album, riding a wave of prolificacy never so pronounced.

Three albums released in the last two years, plus an autobiography ("Porcelain"), by an artist never tamed, always attentive to contemporaneity and evidently wounded by the political turn taken by his native country. Disappointment, disillusionment, anger, and pessimism, all poured into this new "Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt" (a quote from "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Vonnegut), which comes five years after the last solo effort (the decent "Innocence") and just one year after the second album by Moby & The Void Pacific Choir, "More Fast Sound About The Apocalypse".

Released as usual via Little Idiot/Mute, the new work completely abandons the urgent electro-rock outbursts of the two albums with the Void Pacific Choir, to return to a musical language more akin to the Moby of the late nineties/mid-2000s, the one of the commercial breakthrough with the masterpiece "Play" and the excellent subsequent "18". However, times change, Mr. Melville Hall is twenty years older and has to reckon with it, so the cards on the table have inevitably been reshuffled.

As made clear by the beautiful lead single "Like A Motherless Child" (a reinterpretation of a classic African American traditional song), the new Moby sets the coordinates starting from a primarily trip-hop base, which is gradually enriched with gospel influences (the aforementioned single), pop, rock, soul, and electronic elements.

The stunning "Mere Anarchy" is a sumptuous opener, one of the best Moby tracks post-"Play", and sets the table perfectly; the subsequent "The Waste Of Suns" is also chilling, dark and leaden as per the manual. "The Tired And The Hurt" and "Falling Rain And Light" will make the Play sound nostalgics happy, "The Ceremony Of Innocence" focuses on a circular and insistent piano, and in general, Moby does not succumb to the urge for experimentation for its own sake, crafting a dark and gloomy yet rather accessible album, where there is no shame in refining the tracks with small concessions to pop and rock ("The Last Of Goodbyes"), but always with class and consistency.

Consistency that leads him to close with the darkest and most trip-hop track of the album, "A Dark Cloud Is Coming", enriched by a pleasant bluesy nuance.

At 53, Richard Melville Hall gives us his best album in years, imbued with inspiration and immense class, crowning a journey that is increasingly consistent and never tamed. A pleasant surprise in this early part of 2018.

Best track: "Mere Anarchy"