Shakenstir » Moby’s Back with Innocents LP

Moby is one of the most innovative and individual forces in electronic and popular music today. He has sold over 20 million albums, headlined Glastonbury, and is back with arguably one of the best albums of his career, Innocents, released on 30th September 2013, through Little Idiot. The first song to be released from the album is from Moby and Cold Specks, A Case For Shame (http://youtu.be/58MUwnspBRk), available now from Itunes (http://smarturl.it/innocentsitunes).

Innocents is Moby’s most collaborative album to date. For the first time in his career he worked with an outside producer, friend Mark “Spike” Stent, whose résumé includes Madonna, U2, Muse, Björk, and Massive Attack. The list of eminent collaborators on Innocents includes Wayne Coyne (The Flaming Lips), alt-rock legend Mark Lanegan, Cold Specks, Skylar Grey – best known for co-writing and performing on Eminem and Rihanna’s Love The Way You Lie, indie-folk singer Damien Jurado and Inyang Bassey who was the vocalist on The Right Thing from Destroyed. He has named them the Innocents.

The Innocents became the inspirational motif for the album, embracing human vulnerability and the desire for human connection, and celebrating imperfection in a world that too often esteems unrealistic and artificial perfection. The first song to be released from the album A Case For Shame reflects this perfectly with the bitter sweet “doom soul” vocals of critically acclaimed Cold Specks hauntingly repeating ‘Cut Off Your Nose, To Spite Your Face.” The thematic vulnerability is also reflected in the production. Stent is known for big productions, but given the nature of the songs on Innocents he and Moby committed to a more analog and lo-fi production approach. To this end they almost exclusively used old (and usually broken…) equipment in the making of the record.

That duality extends to the messages submerged within the songs, where the frequently stirring, uplifting sounds are subtly contradicted by shadow in the words. The 90’s Manchester sing-along groove of The Perfect Life, with Wayne Coyne for example, belies “lyrics so dark I’m hesitant to say what they’re really about,” Moby says. Elsewhere, The Last Day with Skylar Grey pays doleful tribute to end times (“I’ve only just discovered the sun on the last day”), while album closer The Dogs (the only song on the album fully sung by Moby himself) balances mournful synth-pop melodies with an eerily sinister refrain: “This is where it died/Like the dogs left outside.”

Much of Innocents recalls early Moby in the best way. Moby has been retrofitting antiquated styles and archaic sounds to the electronic age since Natural Blues – one of many enduring hits off of his 1999, twelve-million-plus selling international smash album Play. Innocents, however, carves out its own unique niche in Moby’s discography. Nothing is business as usual about the Innocents experience – down to the album’s idiosyncratic promotion strategy: instead of the usual continent-spanning world tour the entire tour will consist of three, and only three, shows in Los Angeles. Details to be announced.

The epic, emotional and melodic nature of this album reminds us of Moby’s musical ingenuity and singles him out as one of music’s most creative forces.