Moby is done screaming. He’s back to brooding — magnificently.
The musician-producer’s 12-track “Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt” returns us to the orchestral trip-hop he’s famous for following two politically-charged albums of virtual punk.
The album signals he’s post-anger, as if he’s entered a stage of profound grief. Many songs offer a fragile and melancholy Moby whispering about human fragility over velvet swells of ambient, orchestral sounds punctuated by drum loops.
The titles alone seem to suggest we’re in for a bleak affair — “The Sorrow Tree,” “A Dark Cloud Is Coming,” “The Last of Goodbyes” and “The Tired and The Hurt” — but the music is gorgeously gloomy without being depressing. That’s hard to do on an album that mentions darkness 15 times.
For the past few years, Moby raged against Donald Trump in “More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse” and “These Systems are Failing.” Now he’s turned his attention to our souls, referencing W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” and borrowing the new album’s name from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.”