A greatest hits compilation can mean either that creativity has dried up or that the record company is after milking a successful artist. Fortunately on this showing the 2006 release of Go: The Very Best Of Moby can be adjudged as the latter and any cynicism can be dispatched to whence it came as the genre-defyingly awkward New Yorker tackles the musical Marmite that is the concept album.
Personally I rate concept albums more highly than a jumbling of odds and sods but I can see why some wouldn’t. Pretensions can creep in unnoticed by the artist, while there can be too much emphasis on adhering to a theme. Moby’s interpretation of the hedonistic flows of a night out not only skips past these pitfalls but also serves as a thinly veiled middle finger toward those who’ve pigeonholed the bespectacled musical hybrid into the Cliff Richard file of clean-cut composers.
Mellow as ever in parts, Moby takes an electro turn on ‘257.zero’ that beefs up a riff found in Eskimo Disco’s minor 2006 hit ‘7-11’ with all the confidence of a fully-fledged Jedi teaching that wayward Padawan a thing or two. Elsewhere there’s progressive soul guiding the way in ‘Live For Tomorrow’ and skilful minimalism escalating to glorious crescendo in ‘I’m In Love’.
On Last Night Moby finds a song for every mood, in the same way career-highlight Play does.
Pick: 257.zero
7/10
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