Moby’s trip-hop-influenced fifteenth album, Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, seems like it really, really wants to deliver you some sort of meaningful experience. The cover art, which shows a man and child with cow heads, is surely a multi-layered artistic metaphor. The title, ripped from the pages of Slaughterhouse-Five, is a classic English class example of irony. A glance at the track list will reveal songs with names like “The Last Of Goodbyes,” “Welcome To Hard Times,” and “A Dark Cloud Is Coming.” Essentially, it sounds like the audial equivalent of a dystopian film.
Indeed, the first track, “Mere Anarchy,” would be well suited for a dramatic movie trailer. It very much gives off a “world is ending” vibe, and no wonder—the title comes from “The Second Coming,” an apocalyptic poem by William Butler Yeats. The electronic noises at the beginning of the song are dissonant in just the right way; the percussion that kicks in around the one-minute mark is absolutely stellar. On top of all that, the way Moby speaks the verses like they’re poetry is fantastically jarring paired with the track’s simulated strings. The song seems like the perfect segue into a thought-provoking, larger-than-life journey.
The problem is, it’s not. Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt will only take you in circles.
This is frustrating because Moby is not incompetent. He’s far from it. In past songs like “Extreme Ways,” he’s constructed entire complex cities of sound. Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt is just not that. Does it achieve the “dystopian movie soundtrack” feel it seems to be aiming for? Yes, but only if the hypothetical movie in question consists of a single 56-minute shot of a nondescript car speeding toward some unknown destination.
Moby is good at crafting atmosphere. However, he relies upon the same formula to create it again and again, making the songs on the record difficult to distinguish from each other. Ambient synths and drum loops are essential in this formula. So are guest vocals from female artists (Apollo Jane, Mindy Jones, Julie Mintz, Brie O’Bannon, and Raquel Rodriguez—all of whom have gorgeous voices, incidentally). So is Moby’s speak-singing. All of these things seem like bold, innovative choices at first, but not so much when we’re hearing them for the fifth time.
The songs that do stand out also aren’t all that. “The Ceremony Of Innocence” is memorable due to a piano riff that somewhat evokes Adele’s “Someone Like You” and a grand crescendo, but it’ll ultimately leave you feeling kind of empty, like you’re in an abandoned concert hall with no one to fill the seats. Later on the album, “This Wild Darkness” sounds vaguely like “Demon Days” by Gorillaz, but without Damon Albarn or a gospel choir or distinct instrumental shifts. There is often virtue in simplicity, but simplicity that lacks a sense of rawness and heat is hard to find appealing, and although this album isn’t exactly cold… well, it’s a little nippy.
On that note, as you can probably conjecture if you’ve read this far, Everything Was Beautiful is overwhelmingly gloomy. This is not because it is vulnerable nor because it talks about tragic events. Rather, it’s the opposite: Moby maintains the same flat tone 75 percent of the time, and his lyrics are so ambiguous that they could be used as a Rorschach test of sorts. It’s true that he employs lots of slick assonance and internal rhyme, but at what cost? What does “I let too much in/And the souls begin/We were so much alive/I couldn’t win” really mean, anyway?
There is a statistical chance that if you listen to this record, you might find it enjoyable or insightful. If this happens to you, more power to you! I’m glad Moby’s vision is speaking to you. If you’re like most people, though, you might find yourself thinking something more cynical when it’s over: “Good; now I can be happy again.” Sometimes there’s power in darkness, but this album’s largely a sky of storm clouds with no thunder nor lightning.
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