Moby - Last Night
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.47 You Save: $7.51 (50%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.53 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Last Night
Free Music Review: I say this is the best Moby album. I love this one!!!!!
Hit: 5 Stars
Hi I recently bought this CD and I listen to it over and over and don't get tired of it. If you like Moby and you don't have this CD, get it. You won't be disappointed. You might fall in love with it like I did! :)Free Music Review: Enjoyable, But No "Hotel"
Hit: 4 Stars
I bought this album two or three weeks after it came out, and wrote a review of it then, but I'm only now getting around to posting it. Odd how the two years and ten months that separated "18" and "Hotel" seemed so much longer to me than the three years that separated "Hotel" and "Last Night." "Play" is good, "18" is almost excellent, and "Hotel" is probably one of the twenty most perfect albums ever put out by anyone in any genre. Each is almost completely different from its predecessor, and I suppose "Last Night" continues that pattern, but it often recalls Moby's pre-"Play" singles and E.P.s, as well as individual tracks of his albums, making it seem less unprecedented than "18" or "Hotel."
I'll start with the basics. "Last Night" has fifteen songs (two of which are on the same track, something I hate) with an average length of 4:21, compared to "Play"'s 3:27, disc 1 of "Hotel"'s 3:46, and "18"'s 3:57. But the increased song length doesn't hurt it, and the album actually feels much shorter than "Play," despite being three minutes longer.
The first half is fast-paced, and none of the songs have a full set of audible lyrics, while at the same time none of the instrumentals are devoid of at least some vocal samples or background talk. One of these is a rap by members of 419 Squad, and a rap by Grandmaster Caz pops up randomly in the middle of another, but neither are particularly intelligible (the full rap sounds like it's done through one of those filters Beck always uses).
The second half begins with two fully audible and fully vocal songs which strongly recall Moby's past sound (although no specific song in the latter). Then the rapid tempo of the music falls and we are treated to four instrumentals, three of which have no singing or talking whatsoever. Then Sylvia Gordon comes in for the finale, which recalls "Temptation" from "Hotel" (perhaps a little too much) yet has a very sparse musical backing reminiscent of "Doctor Who" background music. After about half a minute of silence there's another four-minute song with shades of David Bowie's "Bring Me the Disco King." The final count is seven vocal songs, three semi-instrumentals, and five instrumentals. As far as structure and cohesion go, "Last Night" is good, better than "18" or "Play."
But on an individual song level it's something of a letdown. Actually, it's at about the same level of quality as "18;" probably a little better. Three years ago I would have been joyous, if not elated, to hear "Last Night." But after "Hotel" it seems weak, like a waste of Moby's talent. Only "Ooh Yeah," "Everyday It's 1989," and "Live for Tomorrow" would even have been worthy of inclusion on "Hotel." Listening to "Last Night," I could often tell where it was going, in stark contrast to "Hotel." It also lacks the wild eclecticism of "Play" or "18." One thing I do love is how it contains a lot of retro synthesis, with tone colors you don't hear much these days and many notes that sound like they were sampled from pre-mid-Nineties video games.
This time around Moby doesn't show off his gifts as a singer, lyricist, rocker, or crafter of ambient textures. While it's inevitable that any one album will fail to use a few of his diverse talents, the absence of lead vocals from him is one disappointment that's hard to get past. Instead he uses eleven guest vocalists and more sampled singing than I care to tally. Not only is this a wasted opportunity since he's such a good singer, it diminishes the sense of it being his album.
Another thing bothers me. The samples, as previously noted, are back with a vengeance, but, whereas the liner notes of "Play" and "18" had meticulous documentation of whose voices are sampled and from what songs, "Last Night"'s liner notes don't tell me anything of the sort. If you unfold them, there's a poster that says "Disco lies." I don't know what that's all about.
Overall, "Last Night" is a good album; the best new album I've bought since the Postmarks' debut sixteen months ago. No plodding, no skip-worthy tracks, plenty of energizing and uplifting sound, and some heavily layered songs I can listen to endlessly and still pick up new things. But it clearly doesn't take full advantage of Moby's artistic potential, and the lack of his friendly, familiar voice leaves me somewhat cold.
Free Music Review: well, disappointing
Hit: 4 Stars
I love Moby. Neary everything he does, and how he does it, and his personal style as well. However, I think I'm falling out of love, finally.
He's phoning it in now, folks. But I'll still forgive him every time, regardless.
Perfect example. At the 1:18 mark into "257.Zero", these movie soundtrack strings swell-up from the background. That sorrowful, sappy, "borrowed soul" routine and chord progression (in all it's forms) has now become his bread and butter for oh, now about 3 maybe 4 full albums. Sometimes it's actual voice he's sampled (on Play and 18), sometimes just a few string or synth string samples, but the pallet of paint he's drawing from has too few colors, it's now becoming more clear.
The guy's got mad talent, that can never be denied. And he's as much a DJ and producer as any kind of ol' skewel, guitar-slingin' George Thoroughgood.
But man, it's finally starting to get tiring. And the worst sin of all, boring. That gushing self-promo text copy Moby released a month before the album (became part of the album's liner notes) helped get the cash outta my pocket, but that was, in hindsight, the true scent of the fully packaged product that Moby has molded himself into.
I've now listened to "Ooh Yeah" about a hundred times and am still not tired of it. A lot to love about the construction of this single, but just today started to hear the sloppy sample envelopes (the "cut-off's", for samples). When you're listing on headphones and already have ears like a bat, the slapdash work starts to expose itself.
So I'm wondering, "doesn't Moby hear the subsonic grind or muffle in this sample, why didn't he filter that out...", or, "the freakin' sample stops a 1/4 second too soon, and it's a repeated loop!..." I'm thinkin', "he HAS to be able to hear this amateur cr*p too, and either he actually did it that way on purpose, or he doesn't care anymore (or never did?), and figures oh well, it's product meant to sell, get the masters to the record company, dress up for another photo shoot, and take the money and run!..."
When Play dropped, IMO, at the time, it was practically revolutionary in several ways. That's when I was head over heals in love. Couldn't get enough. Loved 18 too, even though it was basically just Play again. Those old, authentic soul voices, over minimalist tech beats worked, very well, and Moby is the one person who put it together that way.
But I'm getting bored Mr. Moby, and I don't buy your records to support your vegan issues. I buy 'em for good dance music, or just good electronic music. Though, that you put yourself out there, political issues and all, is part of your appeal for me, so, keep spinnin' it!
Free Music Review: Disco nostalgia with a quirky smile !
Hit: 4 Stars
It's easy to forget that before Moby's multi-million-shifting 1999 album "Play", he was a fading rave artist.Putting his patented electro-blues on hold, he now re-embraces clubbier material, glitter-spraying it with lush synthesized strings and sweeping melodies.
The bald vegan god-botherer Moby has fallen back in love with dance music and with this album he shows how his disco faith remains fervent from the big rave anthem of "Everyday It's Like 1989" to the quizzical slow groove of "Ooh Yeah".
"Last Night", stuffed as it is with old-skool house and hedonistic club bangers, has more than a certain whiff of nostalgia about it.
The track "Alice", a low-end rumble of electronica and hip hop, is the killer track, but the rest of the album covers quite a different spectrum of sound. At least half of it is day-glo rave in nature, from opener, "Ooh yeah", to "I'm In Love" and "I Love To Move In Here"..
The album , while tinted with hip-hop, primarily celebrates the nebulous utopianism of acid-house nightlife, explicitly so on "Everyday It's 1989".
Pumping beats and sensual grooves abound, including several knowing throwbacks to Italian rolling pianos and belting diva vocals of late 1980s house music, which ring out on a paean to good times gone. But there are also pulsing electronic torch songs, lustrous instrumentals and woozy ballads.
Big on melodies and upbeat moods, "Last Night" is Moby's most non-rock, disco-friendly, purely pleasurable album since "Play".
Collaborators include Grandmaster Caz, the man who provided most of the rhymes for the first hip-hop hot Rappers' Delight, but, though this is supposed to be Moby, erm, letting his hair down, there is an air of detachment about this concept album which fosters, rather than dispels the idea of Moby as some intellectual knob-twiddler.
"Last Night" is, loosely, a concept album that seeks to conjure up a night of multiple clubbing and walking home woozily through Manhattan at dawn - and, by that measure, it's a triumph. It charts an evening out, spanning hands-in-the-air rave to elegantly trashed comedown
It has its great moments, and they're usually when he reveals his sense of fun.
Fortunately on the CD there's enough Mobyesque quirk to save it from banality.
Free Music Review: Still Going Strong After Many Years of Musicmaking (4 1/2 stars)
Hit: 4 Stars
There are only a handful of music artists whose new releases I would buy without sampling beforehand, and Moby is justifiably among them. After only a day of owning Last Night I've already been able to appreciate it as yet another praiseworthy installment in Moby's extensive discography, and was not disappointed in the least. Although Last Night is not necessarily Moby's strongest work, it still succeeds in pleasurably combining a lot of his past styles with some new elements as well to create an overall excellent listening experience. A few of my all-time favorite Moby tracks can be found on this album, including the great mystic techno piece "257.zero" (which has layered electronic quirks and a female voice speaking numbers in the background) and "Disco Lies", which has some soulful female vocals and a really catchy bass riff. There were only a few melodies that were weak in my opinion; the opening track, for example, is primarily composed of a really irritating voice repeatedly going "ooh yeah" which makes an otherwise great melody a bit degraded. Although it's one of the singles for the CD, I also wasn't too impressed with "Alice". This track relies a lot on a rap segment, which seems like it would have been better replaced by the vocals from Moby which are heard intermittently throughout it. Last Night is a lot less focused on Moby's vocals than Hotel, which is a mild disappointment since I enjoy Moby's voice but all in all the vocals on this CD are still perfectly satisfactory. A number of the tracks contain vocal samples similar to the ones found on Moby's older albums Play and 18, which often use pieces of soul singers that tend to be catchy. Last Night is strongest for its most techno-oriented songs in my opinion, but the four mellow songs at the end are commendable also for their soft, soothing sound. Conclusively, Last Night is an album any diehard Moby fan cannot do without and that any electronica fan will likely enjoy also. I would rate it four and a half stars, and highly recommend it.