After the meditative electronica of 2002's '18' and
the singer-songwriter moves of 2005's 'Hotel', Moby returns to the dance
floor with a vengeance on his new album 'Last Night'. Spanning hands-in-the-air,
smiley-faced rave anthems, cosmic Giorgio Moroder-styled Euro-disco,
hip-hop both old school and underground, and downtempo, end-of-the-night
ambience, 'Last Night' is a dance music tour de force that looks back
at Moby's deep roots in the club scene at the same time as it embraces
the future.
Reacting against the downbeat quality of previous albums like 'Hotel',
'18' and the blockbuster 'Play', Moby "wanted to make an album
that was a little more playful, a little more reflective of [his]
life as it actually is." While Moby has garnered a bit of a reputation
as a joyless militant as a result of the way he once expressed his
beliefs and has been frequently characterised by the British music
press as a teetotaling vegan Jesus freak, he says, "That's just
not who I am. I'm more likely than not to stay out until 5am drinking
with my friends."
In fact, 'Last Night' is conceptually structured like one of these
epic nights out, moving from the building excitement of the early
evening to peak-time euphoria to 2 am confusion and the blissful peace
of the early morning New York city sunrise. Moby hesitantly admits
that Last Night is in fact something of a concept album as it attempts
to condense an entire night out into a 60-minute album. But banish
any thoughts of deaf, dumb and blind pinball savants or prog rockers
sailing topographic oceans because the concept doesn't get in the
way of the dance floor imperative and merely serves to give a subtle
narrative arc to 'Last Night's' exploration of the energy of nightlife.
Since he has been heavily involved in New York's club scene since
the mid-80s, Moby is well placed to conjure the atmosphere of degenerate
excess. Moby first started going to clubs as a teenager in 1980, a
time many consider the golden age of New York nightlife. "It
seemed like after the 70s there was a disco backlash and no one in
the rest of the world wanted to know about dance music, but dance
music here was still thriving," Moby remembers. "The DJs
would be playing hip-hop and freestyle and dancehall reggae and house
music and weird electronic music. It was just an open, amazing time.
I feel really, really grateful to have come of age musically during
that time."
'Last Night' recaptures this anything-goes spirit, casting genre
purism to the wind in favour of a jubilant eclecticism in love with
both energy and sound. 'Last Night's' "I Love to Move in Here"
is an homage to the earliest days of hip-hop when it was still innocent,
happy to cosy up to disco beats and concerned with nothing more than
cold rocking a party. To this end, Moby hooked up with one of the
truly legendary old school MCs, Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush
Brothers, the man who provided most of the rhymes for hip-hop's first
big hit, The Sugarhill Gang's "Rappers' Delight", who provides
a motorvational rap on a track that functions as a thumbnail sketch
of New York dance music.
"It always made me really sad that the rave scene died off
because those big, larger than life, euphoric, piano-driven rave anthems,
I always really loved them," Moby says. "I feel like I've
become an evangelist for big, piano-driven rave anthems." With
their pumping diva vocals, shiny, happy piano chords and sped-up breakbeats,
"Everyday It's 1989" and "The Stars" recall the
golden age of rave and could have been drawn straight from one of
his set lists from Future Shock (the New York club which was the home
of rave in the USA and one of Moby's residencies).
Elsewhere, Moby divines the glorious spirit of Euro-disco (the dark
synth lines of the Giorgio-Moroder-meets-Hardfloor "I'm in Love"
and 'Last Night's' opening track, "Oo Yeah", which Moby
describes as "the sort of thing that you would hear if you were
to go over to Halston's house in 1978 before going out to Studio 54"),
pays tribute to the legendary New York garage DJs Larry Levan and
Tony Humphries as well as the early 90s house scene in San Francisco
on "Disco Lies", and conjures majestic, elegaic orchestral
sweeps reminiscent of Play on "Degenerates" and "Mothers
of the Night".
'Last Night' does more than just look back, however. What has always
set Moby apart from many of his peers working in electronic music
has been his appreciation of traditional song structure, and on 'Last
Night' he uses more conventional compositional techniques to come
up with new fusions. On "Hyenas", Moby works with an expatriate
Algerian vocalist he discovered singing James Brown in phonetic English
at a karaoke bar in New York, surrounding her in a dark and melancholy,
slightly psychedelic atmosphere that was inspired by both Roxy Music
and Serge Gainsbourg. "Alice" is 'Last Night's' second hip-hop
track, but instead of paying tribute to the old school, Moby enlists
Smokey and S.O. Simple of Nigerian hip-hop group 419 Squad and Aynzli,
both living in the UK, to create a track that is reminiscent of the
futuristic hip-hop being released on the UK's Big Dada label.
The album's final track, the title track, features Sylvia Gordon
from the criminally underrated New York band Kudu. Rather than using
Kudu's more familiar New Wave-influenced dance music, Moby sets Gordon
within a chimescape of eerie synths and mournful string washes and
foregrounds the Billie Holiday qualities of her voice. Apparently,
Gordon had been up for a couple of days when recording her vocals,
and the beatific exhaustion present in her voice evokes stumbling
home at eight in the morning in dappled sunrise light and provides
a perfect ending for 'Last Night's' evocation of the nocturnal urban
demimonde.
'Last Night' is out now.
