With this widescreen delivery Moby has made an album at once more profound and more substantial than anything we have heard from him in a long time, and certainly more personally meaningful than Play.
Moby captures a mood that is utterly appropriate for early 2018, a mood for late winter, a mood for, say, the near-hopeless first half of The Handmaid's Tale. It is the despondent calm in advance of the determined storm. It is the best thing Moby has done in a long time.
Despite the overwhelming melancholy that drenches the album, it remains a gorgeous collection that is mostly indebted to trip-hop and his pre-millennial output, with a few nods to the quieter moments on 2013's Innocents.
This is going to be the background music of every independently owned Vegan restaurant in the world before summer, but Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt deserves better than that. Fifteen albums in, Moby still delivers the goods.
Much like Kurt Vonnegut, from whose work he borrows the title of his fifteenth album, Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, Moby now looks for transcendence amid the chaos and pain inherent to the human condition, using melancholic subject matter to create one of his most mellifluous albums in years.
Lush and haunting, Everything applies the Moby ideal of soulful vocals and big beats to the not-all-that-farfetched idea of a post-apocalyptic landscape, its slow-burn compositions meticulously echoing the dread and despair that results from being human, with dub beats and Yeats lyrics serving as reminders of pre-Big One existence.
Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a bitter pill to swallow, but Moby deserves respect for not shying away from the conflicting emotions that he’s been feeling inside ever since the events of November 2016. That he’s turning them into a rapturous piece of art like this instead of venting his spleen in the echo chamber of social media is worthy of praise and attention. Just do yourself the favor of taking this album in moderation.
It’s a bummer, man—albeit a great-sounding bummer.
Rather than funnel more rage, Moby’s latest record, the cloyingly titled Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, collapses into the melancholy that’s left behind when the adrenaline runs out and the world remains terrible.
This really feels like one of Moby’s most consistent and cohesive albums from front to back. I really enjoy the sound play and more trip-hop approach on this album, and it really feels like Moby is doing what he does best here, in making emotionally vulnerable but striking electronica. Really great despite it running together a little.
Despite a few successful ambient parts Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt is a repetitive slug which doesn't boast any interesting material, It's acceptable background music but Moby is a shadow of his former self at this point
This is honestly Moby’s best album since Play. I’ve listened to this pretty consistently since it came out in 2018, which is quite a bit of a compliment for a late career album from anybody. Just as vital and emotional as his earlier work and much like the rest of his catalogue, painfully overlooked.
This really feels like one of Moby’s most consistent and cohesive albums from front to back. I really enjoy the sound play and more trip-hop approach on this album, and it really feels like Moby is doing what he does best here, in making emotionally vulnerable but striking electronica. Really great despite it running together a little.
1 | Mere Anarchy 5:15 | 98 |
2 | The Waste of Suns 4:44 | 98 |
3 | Like a Motherless Child 4:37 | 97 |
4 | The Last of Goodbyes 4:23 | 98 |
5 | The Ceremony of Innocence 3:56 | 97 |
6 | The Tired and the Hurt 4:28 | 98 |
7 | Welcome to Hard Times 5:08 | 97 |
8 | The Sorrow Tree 4:28 | 97 |
9 | Falling Rain and Light 4:46 | 97 |
10 | The Middle Is Gone 5:13 | 97 |
11 | This Wild Darkness 4:09 | 98 |
12 | A Dark Cloud Is Coming 5:24 | 99 |
/ | Magnetic |