Moby // Innocents

A formidable back catalogue and a non-musical life revolving around photography means by now, Moby is a dab hand at crafting stunning soundscapes. Innocents, with its magnificent fragility, is nothing short of beautiful in that sense. Channelling The Smiths’ contradictory techniques, Innocents sounds majestic and uplifting at times – especially on The Perfect Life and Saints – but underneath stirs a dark duality centred on human vulnerability, which emerges in earnest on Tell Me. Featuring multiple guest vocalists (Cold Specks, Wayne Coyne, Mark Lanegan & more), and an external producer (Mark Stent) for the first time in his career, Innocents fully conceptualises the weakness motif; Moby, named after the eponymous whale in Herman Melville’s magnum opus, surrounding himself with companions, protecting himself from the reality of his existence and the meeting of his maker. That’s not to say the themes are so distracting that they interfere to the detriment of the music though; from the instrumental prologue Everything That Rises to the slow burn of The Lonely Night, Innocents is classic Moby, but despite being his eleventh studio LP, manages to avoid sounding too hackneyed. Final, summative track The Dogs concludes the album in fittingly melancholic fashion, with a lone Moby singing, “This is where it died/Like the dogs left outside” over yearning strings and stripped back beats. Innocents is an incredibly accessible album, most likely because of the subtle but frequent comments on the nature of being human. Vulnerability is an inherent human emotion, and an album that explores it can’t fail to provoke a reaction, especially when executed so well. 8/10 Alex Throssell