Moby

"Everything is Wrong" (Album, 1995)

Into The Blue was the song that attracted me to Moby. Up until hearing it, I'd been unimpressed with what I'd heard from this American exponent of commercial acid house techno. Therefore, I was not surprised to find that Into The Blue was one of the few songs not written by Moby alone. I picked up 1995's Everything is Wrong simply because it had the track on it and had a (discount store) cover price of just £4. The song was just as good as I remembered - an ethereal excursion with a wonderful simplicity carried by co-writer Mimi Goese's unconventional yet haunting vocal style. The piano-based instrumentals of Hymn, God Moving Over The Face of The Waters and Everything is Wrong are emotional and well-written. When It's Cold I'd Like to Die is the other track co-written with vocalist Goese and is a good closure to the album.

What I wasn't prepared for, was the dreadful, contrived, overtly commercial and just plain bad house that fills most of the remainder of the album; incredibly out-dated dance music that doesn't even stand up to most of the output of the scene it seems 'inspired' by. But then, that was getting on towards a decade before this album appeared. This is like amateur, home-made acid house from someone who didn't realise that the world had moved on a long way in the intervening years. The Motorhead rip-off All That I Need Is To Be Loved is a bizarre inclusion in the context of everything else here. This is largely unoriginal, cheesy and embarrassing. What the hell was the mainstream press doing praising this man to high Heaven? If they thought this was special then there would have been no hope for dance music at the beginning of the 1990s and I'd have left the planet if this was supposed to signal its future. Fortunately it didn't and this now seems like the anachronistic, cliche-ridden dirge is mostly is. 4/10

Rob Dyer