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Moby – Last Night
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Moby’s 1999 album Play notoriously had every single one of its tracks lifted and plonked on an advertisement or soundtrack, extolling the virtues of anything from mid-range Japanese cars to sickly bars of milk chocolate.
So it’s safe to say that Last Night, dance music’s most famous vegan tofu-griddler’s return to a more familiar sound after almost a decade of guitar-based and ambient noodling, must have advertising departments worldwide wetting their knickers in anticipation.
Last Night is supposedly Moby’s homage to New York nightlife, with the course of the 14 song album charting an all-night bender. This leads us to wonder exactly what a 42-year-old man has to tell us all about New York club-life – that the music is a bit too loud, perhaps? Or there’s not much of a tune, it’s all just bloody boom-boom-boom?
It’s all firmly a nod to the past. ‘Everyday it’s 1989’, with its crunching, cheap-sounding drum machine and nostalgic Italo-house piano, is a bit like Black Box’s ‘Ride On Time’, only severely Mobyfied. And with its vocodered vocals and acid house squelches, ‘257.Zero’ is almost very good.
But the “almost” is all-important. It’s almost as if Moby has an “aural wallpaper” lever on his mixing desk which he pulls down enthusiastically before sending off his master tapes. Songs like ‘I Love to Move in Here’ almost work, but the swaggering “Old school/Taking you back again” vocal sounds just too contrived.
As the album draws to a close – along with Moby’s night out, presumably – he retracts a little into noodle territory once more with the likes of ‘Sweet Apocalypse’ and ‘Degenerates’. If Last Night really does chronicle a night out in New York, hardened clubbers should probably start booking their one-way flights out of the place as soon as possible.
Stewart Turner
