Rating:
Genre:
Electronica
Release Date: 04/01/2008
On
Last Night,
Moby is as blissfully out of touch with modern club music as he is current. As he explains (of course) in the album's liner notes, he has been in the thick of New York City club culture since the early '80s, and he takes the opportunity here to pay tribute to a number of dance music strains that have fallen in and out of fashion -- in a couple cases, they've recently fallen
back into fashion -- including some angles he hasn't taken in well over a decade. The sturdiest, most appealing tracks tend to be where
Moby breaks out with some highly energized combination of rollicking pianos, stabbing keyboards, and random divas, mixing and matching rave,
Hi-NRG, and
disco:
"Everyday It's 1989," "Stars," and
"Disco Lies" (featuring a vocalist who is nearly a dead ringer for a young
Taylor Dayne) would've had no place on any of the last five
Moby albums. What is long maligned and what is trendy sometimes occurs simultaneously, as on
"I Love to Move in Here" (featuring
Grandmaster Caz), a mid-tempo
house track that can be sub-categorized as both hip-house (inciting wicked flashbacks for most haters of either component) and Balearic (as it causes that loosey-goosey, anesthetized-but-still-beaming sensation, prevalent in several of the hippest dance tracks released during 2007 and 2008). The poorly timed, not-so-appealing moments --
"257.zero," "Alice" -- with their distant transmission spoken bits and droning raps, might sound in step whenever the
Soul Jazz label gets around to releasing rarity compilations with contents resembling
Astralwerks' late-'90s compilations for
MTV's
Amp program. The disc's latter 20 minutes, containing contemplative, string-laden tracks, would be as suited for the
Pure Moods series (i.e., beside
Yanni,
Dave Koz) as past tracks
"Porcelain" and
"God Moving Over the Face of the Waters." A good number of
Moby fans who began to follow the producer's moves well before
Play will be inclined to think of
Last Night as the best
Moby album since
Everything Is Wrong. That the album involves several unself-conscious, rush-inducing tracks (rather than the once-expected token track or two) is enough for that opinion to have validity. Ditto the sensible and drastic reduction of
Moby's own vocals.
~Andy Kellman, All Music Guide
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