How do you survive the kind of freak luck that transforms you from a bedroom boffin to a festival act on the back of a cultural fluke like Play? Art for art’s sake. On Wait For Me Moby has integrated that simple but oh-so effective dynamic of hot vocal versus cold tones (vulgarly put, blues and beats) into subsequent behind-the-Iron Curtain digressions.
This album was heavily inspired by a David Lynch speech at the BAFTA awards (the director also lensed the clip for ‘Shot In The Back Of The Head’), the thrust of it being that creativity in and of itself will suffice as both existential code and political statement. To wit, if you’re creating you ain’t consuming, and if you ain’t consuming you ain’t feeding (and feeding off) the Moloch machine.
What Moby also claims in common with Lynch is a love of abandoned factories, slaughterhouses, oil-impregnated concrete, metallic atrophy, preserved entropy, creepers and rust, nature reclaiming machinery. Ironic, given both men’s shared green and holistic bent, but this aesthetic yields an end-of-the-world sadness on songs like ‘Hope Is Gone’ and ‘Pale Horses’, in which singer Amelia Zirin Brown keens, “All my family died.” Similarly, ‘Walk With Me’ contrasts a soul sister’s cry from the heart with rumbling thunder and Kubrick banks of synthesizers. You can’t hear it and not channel your own inner CNN footage of war torn cities, broken levees and migrating refugees. When the man himself takes the mic on ‘Stock Radio’, he sounds uncannily like Ian Curtis (course, the Hooky and Sumner bass and guitar drones don’t hurt a bit), while tracks like ‘JLTF’ and ‘A Seated Night’, swap gospel for Gregorian, framed by modern classical and Bowie-in-Berlin textures. An aural installation if you like, except more emotionally direct than such a poncey term suggests. No tricks, but plenty of smoke and mirrors.
Imagine Ballard wrote a libretto for Eno. New forms of beauty.
Peter Murphy
Key track: ‘Walk With Me’