There are moments on All Visible Objects when you have to remind yourself that Moby has been making albums since the Nineties. A couple of tracks on here make you wonder how someone with all his experience can make something so dumbfoundedly bad.
Power Is Taken is the worst offender, a ridiculous slab of paranoid house music, riddled with sirens and hyperventilating synths, hardly helped by vocals urging us to “fight against the oppressors”. It ends up sounding like something Jez and Super Hans might cook up on Peep Show.
Rise Up In Love is a limp EDM effort and goes through all the predictable peaks and troughs. Opening track Morningside makes an arresting start, with a soaring vocal sample and a captivating bass wobble but — and this is something that happens all too often — it’s soon slathered in synths, obscuring anything interesting that might be lurking underneath.
It’s made all the stranger by coming amid moments of genuine maturity. Too Much Change is unhurried and considered, while Refuge cleverly fuses the words of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson with fizzy electronics.
Overall though, you feel Moby, with 16 studio albums behind him, could and should do better.
