Moby’s last two albums, 2016’s These Systems Are Failing and 2017’s More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse, blazed with the sort of righteous fury you might expect to surround the election of the United States’ 45th president. Those bookending spats of electroclash tapped into a broader anxiety gnawing at many Americans: that late capitalism is gasping its last and when it goes down, it’ll take a whole lot of us down with it. Even the most politically minded electronic musicians are more or less powerless to stop those systems from failing, but for the first time in his solo career (or at least since 1996’s Animal Rights), Moby exercised the catharsis of making angry punk songs about the sorry state of the world. So what happens after catharsis? Rather than funnel more rage, Moby’s latest record, the cloyingly titled Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, collapses into the melancholy that’s left behind when the adrenaline runs out and the world remains terrible.
Moby once more takes up the techniques he’s honed since his 1999 breakthrough Play launched him to previously unfathomable fame. Instead of tapping his breakbeat hardcore roots for a third time in a row, he falls back on slow, soulful guest vocals treating the new recordings as though they were distant transmissions from an analog past. Using the grit and breathiness of performances from singers Raquel Rodriguez, Julie Mintz, Mindy Jones, Apollo Jane, and Brie O’Bannon, he tailors his guitar, drum, and synthesizer compositions to the organic quality in each vocal loop. When he sings himself, he compresses and dilutes his voice to the point that it, too, sounds like an unearthed artifact drifting through time. This set of aesthetic principles, used liberally across most of Moby’s albums, may never lose its soothing quality.
There’s great beauty in songs built around old things, as hits like “Porcelain” and “Natural Blues” (both built around samples from an Alan Lomax collection of field recordings) proved nearly twenty years ago. Though Everything Was Beautiful incorporates original recordings, not samples, the mournful voices and turntablist beats on songs like “The Sorrow Tree” and “A Dark Cloud Is Coming” seem to hover eerily out of orbit. One song, “Like a Motherless Child,” borrows a refrain from a blues spiritual dating back to the era of American slavery. These displaced words help illuminate the album’s central themes of disillusionment, fear, and abjection: Human suffering is a permanent fixture that can be qualified by a particular political climate, but it has never been birthed by one. That a wealthy, white, male musician would repurpose songs written to bring comfort to black Americans during slavery of course reiterates the colonialist bent that has long haunted Moby’s music, though on this album, unlike Play, at least the vocalists have been paid.
The songs that center on Moby’s voice tend to have less power, not because of the quality of his singing, which remains poignantly unvarnished, but because of the circuitousness of his lyrics. Clunky rhymes and peculiar phrasings abound. “Don’t know my needs, don’t know my way, sir/I had my face, no way to face her,” Moby half-raps on “Like a Motherless Child.” On “The Tired and the Hurt,” he dares to imagine utopia but doesn’t get much further than, “There was hope and endless dreams/There was love and no dying.” More often than not, he employs the vocal tone used on Play’s “The Sky Is Broken,” whose bare instrumentation justified his mumblecore delivery. Against these fuller backdrops, Moby’s murmuring can sound anemic, a flimsy delivery system for words that aren’t really saying anything new.
It could be that the childlike verbiage here is intentional, that Moby’s awkward stutterings intend to illustrate each person’s complete powerlessness against the inevitability of their pain. Certainly, Everything Was Beautiful is the most vulnerable album Moby has made in years, one that doesn’t shy away from desolation and also acknowledges that, within helplessness, beauty can arise. That’s the dynamic that has made Moby’s most moving tracks work: the impulse to luxuriate in despair, to find the lushness in it, rather than shut it down and shove it away. He does that well on Everything Was Beautiful, but he’s already done it better.
