• Rating:
I know that you don't like Moby. Activist, devout Catholic, and committed vegan: Moby is ultimately the anti-rockstar par excellence, the stubborn moral of a country priest, the whining voice that announces the delay of a train at the station, the rerun of the badly dubbed TV series that no one has ever watched and loops on an airport hall screen. I know you don't like him, but today you have to give him a chance, forgetting the worn-out techno-gospel plots of "Play," the sloppy commercial drifts of "Hotel," or the bland dance-flavored constipation of "Last Night": you have to start from Serie B. You have to start from provincial football, from the wild bunch fighting for a playoff spot, from Cittadella, which has been seeking an astonishing promotion to A for twenty years, from the great strikers capable of doing wonders in the second league without being able to repeat themselves on the stage of the first series, from "Mister 135 goals" Stefan Schwoch to Cosimo Francioso, bomber of Grifoni, from Edoardo Artistico to Marco Sansovini of Zeman's Pescara.
You have to start from the spring of 2000, when an unexpected yet apparently unnecessary appendix to the worldwide success of "Play" is released, an album that makes no secret of being what it is, that is, the collection of B-sides that didn't find a place in its illustrious predecessor. Now, this work of the New York musician, with a certain cunning, could be considered in some ways even better than the acclaimed "Play," certainly more sincere, less sleazy, and without any pretense of having to necessarily offer a commercial piece like "South Side" with the Gwen Stefani of the moment, almost entirely instrumental and, yes, ultimately well representative of the honest craft of ambient composer that Moby has always practiced with admirable dedication. The best things? Instrumentals like "Flying Foxes," "Summer," "Flying over the Dateline," "The Sun Never Stops Setting" with the minimalist crescendo that recalls the underrated "Ambient" of 1993. But more exquisitely "à la Play" solutions like "Flower" are not to be despised, as well as incursions into disco music like "Running" surely dearer to the period of "Everything is Wrong" from '95. Of course, there are slow parts and some gaps ("Whispering Wind" lasts a couple of minutes too long and "Sunspot" might be something we could have done without), but the overall sensation is that of a work in which, like a league of a Serie B championship where all teams give each other a hard time with nothing to lose, you pay the honest statement of intent of wanting to offer an album that has no ups and downs, but simply proposes a lively sequence of pleasant instrumentals for just under an hour of pleasant chamber electronica.
And so give him one last chance. Give it to him because this album sounds just like those slightly faded Sunday afternoons returning from the usual day trip to a remote farmhouse in the hinterland, with the car radio crackling amidst the tunnels only to reemerge at the exit of a dirt road, with Ezio Luzzi from "Tutto il calcio minuto per minuto" praising the latest feat of Gianni Comandini, with a header, on the fly or a bicycle kick, after sprinting through the tight lines of a couple of provincial bruisers while the sun never finishes setting.
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