Pros: The odd accidental hit, a workable New Order cover
Cons: Ballads are tedious and some tracks just fail to make any impact at all
The Bottom Line: This is awful saccharine balladry from an artist above this type of music. It is clear he has deliberately catered his sound for whatever reason, and this is just disappointing.
Well, the myopic, depilated rhythm-pixie returns. And this time he’s turning up the heat. No, that’s not right, he’s sort of just put the oven on at about gas mark 5 to cook some tofu. Hotel, from the outset looks and feels just like a nice homely little record. It is packaged in a cardboard box and has some bland, functional photographs of the music maestro looking fairly disinterested with the whole thing. The front cover is a shot of the back of Richard Melville Hall’s head as he stares out at New York city and possibly at his tea shop. And it smells pristine and new, like a new Nissan Micra. But like said car, on the inside all that awaits you is another level of polished boredom as the little Japanese tin can starts up with refined efficiency and businesslike reliability, only needed refuelling once in a while to show that you care. Hotel is like that dull new car. You enjoy it for the first two drives and then afterwards the reality of how mediocre the thing is hits you and you look out enviously at the Mercs and the BMWs, cars you will never have because you are consigned to your petit, nice, prissy little car, in all its factory-green dullness. Hotel is simply this, an album that sounds as if it comes from a production line. It is incredibly mediocre, unexciting and the songs are written and composed almost mechanically, and like assembling a car, all of the components are brought together and another song is made. So I give you Hotel, folks, 15 Nissan Micras.
Moby’s canon is fairly well-known. In the early nineties it was techno and underground brain-drains such as ‘Go,’ in the mid-㥢s it was rock mixed with casual social concern with the ridiculously fleshed-out ‘Animal Rights’ album. Then ‘Play’ made him a very rich man, as did his film score music. As a body of work this resembles his last album, the almost entirely gospel 㢶.’ The difference here is that there are no longer any vocal or fast drum samples over his main melodies, it is simply Moby at the mic with his piano, guitar and trusted female vocalist Laura Dawn. The result is a yearning for the halcyon days of his samples and his slightly more mysterious presence on records. We just get a little too much of Richard Hall on this record, and less of Moby, if you get my drift. Moby toured with New Order a few years back, and there is a glossy cover of one of their songs here, unfortunately. This special edition comes with an ambient CD, which I won’t discuss as ambient music only appeals to me when I’m wanting too send myself off to sleep. That said, Moby is pretty au fait with this type of music, so this disc is a nice extra. But the 15 tracks need to be analysed, scrutinised and criticised.
1. Hotel Intro (1:55)
Intros are pointless, aren’t they? There is no need for this sort of self-congratulatory beginning to any sort of record. Did the Beatles have intros to their records? No, they just began wonderfully and ended wonderfully. This doesn’t. An intro is supposed to excite one about a record. This opens with some digital, synthesised chords and some annoying percussive tapping, before some strings enter. This is actually a sort of showcase of the formula this record uses. Some muddled drums then come in and the whole thing sounds a little pretentious and annoying. It is also a complete rip-off of the track ‘Look Back In’ from his last album, which was a filler and was far better than this rather pointless start to things.
2. Raining Again (3:45)
This starts promisingly with some urgent piano plonking and some gritted-teeth vocals while some thumping drums bang away in the background. Then the chorus comes in and things become very cosy and friendly. The problem is that the track jumps into the strings too quickly. In previous efforts the strings were supposed to be the emotional apex of his songs, here they just provide some background listener-friendly noise. The piano rhythm is also a bastardised version of far superior piano chord jumping rhythms such as ‘Honey’ or ‘Run On,’ both from Play. It feels as if he’s simply harnessed some of the best ideas for melodies and rhythms he has and put them all together in a big mixture of mediocrity, tossing some gospel backing singers in there for good measure. The third verse is quite irritating as the drums rap over a more tinny vocals while the organ plays loudly - this just sounds confused and a way to fill time to we get back to that chorus, which I guess is supposed to be where this song makes its impact. “Oh and its raining again, light on your car like bullets on tin,” he sings without a simulacrum of emotion in his voice. There is always a tremulous edge to his voice, like he is one the verge of crying, which made some of his more lugubrious efforts such as ‘Porcelain’ so appealing, but here he simply sings in a bland style, his voice Wayne Coyne-like but without 1% of the man’s vocal uniqueness. Imagine Coyne shaven-headed, manically depressed and with his own vegan tea shop and you get the idea.
3. Beautiful (3:12)
This opens with a very annoying jumping riff with very annoying “Come on baby, come on girl, I love you baby, I love you now” lyrics. The first verse is sparse and the chorus is deeply annoying and unashamedly saccharine. The second verse is exactly the same as the first, which is lazy and infuriating. “Look at us we’re beautiful, all the people push and pull but, let’s go for a ride,” is the chorus. The third section has a teensy modulation but the same annoying guitar melody fights over the dreary and smirking strings that stain this track. Its just very corny and lovey, two things Moby never did in the past. This is just all very disappointing and lacks any sort of edge. It seems as if Moby is afraid to wander back into that dark territory from his last records, and he’s willing to settle for making sappy, uninspired garbage like this with lyrics so inane they may as well have been chosen by a committee trying to compose the least offensive, most pandering commercial record ever recorded. Yuck.
4. Lift Me Up (3:19)
I saw this performed live on TV and enjoyed it. Here it fairs less well because of a slight overproduction. It opens with a nice fuzzy bass line and acoustic guitar melody. Moby’s weary vocals are rather enjoyable here, because the song does have more of an edge to it than the other stuff. The chorus is more of a triumph and more anthemic, and has a more techno grunt to it despite the strings fighting to get in in the background. The chorus very easy to sing along to, but there is less polish and finesse and corniness, so this is one of the album‘s best. “Lift me up, higher now I’m high,” is what I think he sings, but unfortunately he’s a mite indecipherable here. The third section descends into a bit of a messy mixture of overdubs and backing singers but this is one of the better singles on this.
5. Where You End (3:22)
Opens with a bland piano melody and it becomes a flat dance-ballad tinged with a faux-melancholy. The chorus is almost as irritating and syrupy as track 3: “If I could kiss you now, I’d kiss you now again and again, I don’t know where I begin and where you end,” he sings, presumably trying to get some work writing valentine’s day card sentiments. This is simply inexcusable and a little cringe worthy. Moby can communicate genuine sentiment in a far more convincing and musical pleasing way than this. He’s simply toning down his more sombre and lugubrious tracks for this half-baked ballad that doesn’t know whether it wants to be happy or sad. It makes me sad, but not for that reason. The strings also contribute to the demolition of this track.
6. Temptation (4:54)
This is that New Order cover I promised you. It begins impressively with a ghoulish piano melody and a slight drum beat. The female vocalist Laura Dawn is fine, nothing remarkable, but she gets overtaken in the chorus by the strings which come in too heavily in this track, which should be much more quiet and haunting. The original sounds like a very impressive and chilling track, and the lyrics easily quash Moby’s self-penned for impact and chill-factor. These show him up and this track gets by on the strength of the original, I feel. A great track like this is difficult to mangle, and I think that Moby should have been a little more considerate and less overzealous on the strings. However, it is still a fairly moving rendition, if a little unnecessary. The repeated chorus that closes this is wonderful: “Up, down, turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground, tonight I think I’ll walk alone, find my soul as I go home.” This teeters on the brink of gushing sentimentality like earlier works on this, but fortunately is saved by Dawn’s sombre and effective delivery of the excellent lyrics. One of the strongest moments on this, but it is not a sui generis Moby composition.
7. Spiders (3:44)
This really tests me, this track. It begins with a crawling and awful wik-wah guitar and then ends up sounding like something Embrace would have recorded but with much more style and conviction. The chorus is a mite cryptic at first, but then decides it wants to be sentimental and cheap. “Come back to us spiders, come on crush my hands, let peace and beauty reign and bring us love again like you can,” Moby sings, as techno-junkies everywhere tear his picture from their walls and burn all his early CDs. Just an ineffectual track that attempts uplifting but fails on all accounts.
8. Dream About Me (3:21)
Opens with a light drum beat, then jumps into a swirly, synthesiser-led ballad sang by Laura Dawn. Then it becomes a duet, which is simply a mistake. It isn’t really possible to imagine how corny this is in the normal human mind. This is more ineffective sentimental dross, and the duel vocals get annoying after a while, as does the sprawling nature of the song and the grandiose string ending. Not worth the effort.
9. Very (3:41)
A departure into techno? Where did this come from and what is it doing on this album? This is something that Moby could have recorded 10 years ago, and it seems strange and incongruous on this album. Laura Dawn sings again on this average techno track, and like all techno music it is very airy and thumping, and a bit stale and lifeless. Plus the modulation in for the nth chorus is a little off. This is a bit of a strange sea change for the album, and I don’t really see what on earth it is doing here. Moby’s eponymous first album has far better techno songs than this, such as the thunderous ‘Yeah,’ or the idiosyncratic ‘Next Is The E.’ His second album ‘Everything Is Wrong’ is also full of this stuff, and most of it is largely superior to this effort. It makes a change from the sickening ballads, though.
10. I Like It (3:46)
More downbeat stuff now as the album comes to its third half. This is an odd and slightly creepy track that I fear has some off-putting sexual imagery. The bass line is quite infectious and the spacy music I actually enjoy, but I don’t enjoy Moby and Laura Dawn’s seedy duet. Moby is raspy and creepy here, and that’s just a bit disgusting. The fact that this track is about sex makes it wrong and irritating and the music is spoiled by this erroneous subject matter. Songs about this subject are never nice to listen to, and they are largely pointless. Plus this type of thing is simply not Moby’s forte and he makes a mess of this one.
11. Love Should (3:50)
A diabolical title for this bland ballad which has another bland beginning. Almost every ballad begins with a tedious drum rhythm and then the offending instrument starts up. In this case it is the piano which plays something that Moby’s girlfriend probably thought was very moving and so he decided to include it on this album. The chorus is just another master class in demolishing song writing with the most contrived and clichéd sentiments that it is possible for anyone other than Elton John to set to music. “Oh how it rained, and oh how it pours, I never could feel this way for anyone but you,” he sings. Yeah, yeah, - enough already!
12. Slipping Away (3:39)
“All that we needed was right, the threshold is breaking tonight, open to everything happy and sad, seeing the sun when its all going bad,” he sings. Draw your own conclusions. My conclusion as this egregious ballad terrorises my ears is that Moby really cannot successfully feign emotion. Some musicians are wonderful at composing music depending on their own emotional state. In Moby’s earlier works you did get the feeling he was genuinely angry and plagued by depression or a deep-seated anxiety, and it came through in the music. Now that he’s a worldwide success, and has his own tea shop, there’s not really a lot to get peeved or sad about. In 㢶’ we saw that happiness in uplifting tracks such as ‘We Are All Made Of Stars’ or ‘In This World,’ but here he just attempts to compose lots of plaintive ballads that fall flat, like many of the attempts at this type of music did on his last album. We want more happy Moby, not more pretend-sad Moby. It’s just all be big old let down.
13. Forever (3:37)
I enjoy this more because of its more dark sound. The fuzzy bass used so well on ‘Lift Me Up’ is back, and the chorus is less blatantly sentimental, choosing just one repeated lyric: “Oh, we could feel this way forever.” The electric piano is also a nice feature here, and the strings are less oppressive. It is a little sentimental but succeeds at being uplifting and sombre because things are toned down and this is a more downbeat affair. It still feels a little comfortable and friendly however, and maybe the chorus is repeated just a little too much. But compared to some of the many stinkers on this, it is pretty good. With this Moby takes a bow and leaves the microphone, his vocals having made very little impact on this album.
14. Homeward Angel (5:40)
I’ve no idea why the album closes with two ambient dirges, but unfortunately it does. There is a long version of this on the ambient disc, so including it here seems pointless. For me, this is a bland, droning and repetitive voyage into the realms of musical tedium. Perhaps this sort of thing is better in the context of ‘chill-out’ rooms or is helpful while conducting some practices from eastern philosophy. Unfortunately this closes the album limply. Or it would do, were it not for…
15. Untitled (4:50)
This is an even a bigger dirge than the last song, and as so, it is omitted from the album as if it wasn’t even supposed to be there. It opens with a stoned fog horn and then becomes some pretty terrible underwater, sounds-of-the-sea style stuff. But this is ambient music, which I don’t understand the attraction of, so feel free to ignore my criticisms. I just think that these two tracks are a terrible way to end proceedings. Moby seems determined to make this album worse as he goes along, and this ends abysmally.
Moby: Hotel (Disc 1: 57:26) (Disc 2: 67:52)
This album is manna from heaven for those who love saccharine ballads with the most tired and hackneyed sentiments it is possible to conjure up in the loved-up human mind, which I know my mother does. And she’ll be getting my copy of this album for Christmas. This feels like an album Moby wrote to impress his girlfriend or to win the love and admiration of the American masses, who might be the target market for this sort of manufactured soppy stuff. Either way, Moby will find his audience, but he might be perturbed to discover crowds full of geriatrics on his next tour. Only two or three tracks on this album make an impact on me, namely the lucky hit ‘Life Me Up,’ the serviceable New Order cover ‘Temptation’ and very loosely the dreamy ‘Forever.’ But far more impressive work is too be found on his other albums. This record makes ‘Play’ look like a work of genius, and this album is far greater and embarrasses 90% off the stuff here. Moby has nothing new or exciting to offer, and this music is simply forgettable and unappealing.
This is a limited edition two CD set. The first CD is the Hotel album and the second CD is a limited edition ambient CD entitled Hotel-Ambient. The ne...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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