Moby, Wait For Me

Another year and another Moby album, and if you're like me that's not a bad thing. Wait for Me, his eleventh album, was recorded at Moby's home on the lower east side of New York and is decidedly low-key. Taking just over a year to complete, the creative impetus behind the record was hearing famed director David Lynch at a BAFTA event in the UK. It was hearing Lynch talk about how being creative for oneself is perfectly fine as opposed to being creative to accommodate the marketplace. With that in mind Moby set out to make an album for himself rather than what the marketplace might or might not like.

The results of this self-indulgence, if you will, is an epic album that heads the exact opposite direction that his last album, Last Night was headed. Wait for Meis not a dance music album, it is instead an auditory exploration that's predominantly ambient. It's a beautiful record that harks back to some of his older material while still moving forward with rich textures and brilliant ideas. If you can think of Brian Eno meeting Julee Cruise on a quiet night, you can kind of paint a mental picture of what kind of record Moby set out to make. He succeeded in creating something darn near close. Wait for Me is lush, quiet, and subdued and when you consider it was recorded in Moby's bedroom by himself this all makes sense.

Wait for Me was arranged as a cohesive body of work and functions well as a single piece spread out over the 33 or so minutes it takes to listen too. As Moby himself says, "I fully understand that most people listen to individual tracks here and there, but I ask that you listen to the album from start to finish even just once." If you grant him his request, you will be rewarded with a beautifully haunting record that will stir your heart and soul with deeply emotional and unobtrusive songs. Wait for Me is truly angelic and grand.

Orchestral, ambient, and muted, Wait for Me is a nice change of pace for Moby. Wait for Me illustrates that even high profile artists can make fantastic music on their own, in their homes, without multimillion dollar budgets and videos. Moby might not have written Wait for Me as a record for the club, but he seems to have written the perfect record for the morning after and that's not a bad thing.