What is it with synthesisers and sadness? There’s something inherently melancholic about this instrument, a quality that’s been accentuated by its use in the soundtracks to dystopian movies such as Blade Runner. Moby is a man who has exploited this quality to the full during his 20-year recording career, and he does so more than ever on this, his 10th album: Destroyed is really sad. Not bleak, or dark, or bitter; just really sad.
Written in hotel rooms in the course of a world tour, it reflects the rootless, shifting and lonely existence of a man who finds himself in a string of strange cities with nowhere to go except up the walls of his bedroom, or into the murky corners of his psyche (it is released alongside a book of photographs of his life on tour). There’s little here of the throbbing glo-stick energy of Last Night or the poppy gloss of Hotel or the sheer catchiness of the globe-conquering Play. What we have instead is a series of meditations, based on simple melodic motifs – sometimes just a couple of chords, or a string of half a dozen notes – which are worked and worked, over and over again; it’s not dance music, exactly, but it shares that genre’s essential hypnotic repetitiveness.
If this makes it sound like an exercise in shiny electronic minimalism, it’s not: there’s warmth here, too, a sense that music can be a friend. This may be attributable in part to the fact that it was recorded using vintage analogue equipment and mixed on a 1972 Abbey Road mixing desk. Chiefly, though, it’s to do with the power of its simple melodies, and the insistence of its steadily pulsing rhythms. Vocals appear only sporadically, provided by a roster of female guest singers or by Moby himself.
There are times when Destroyed threatens to disappear into the background in an ambient haze. But then it comes back into focus with a cracking track such as “Lacrimae”, which builds and repeats, builds and repeats: the effect is cumulative, rich and beautifully sad.
- Moby, Destroyed at Proud Camden, London NW1, from 18 May to 19 June
- Read theartsdesk's Q&A with Moby
- See a gallery of Moby's Destroyed photographs on theartsdesk
Find Moby on Amazon
Download Moby on iTunes
Book tickets for Moby at the Roundhouse on 2 June
Watch the video for "Be the One"
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