Moby
Hotel
(Mute)
Moby often plays on his painfully right-on credentials, but you can't accuse the New York vegan of selling out on his fifth album. After all, his mainstream breakout Play only reached its audience after he licensed the songs to TV ads. Every single track.
There seems little prospect of him similarly cashing in from Hotel, a hit-and-miss experiment on which the talented musician not only picks up conventional instruments but also sings on several tracks. The former techno and chill-out king has turfed out the samples and loops that made 1999's Play such a masterpiece and the result is a pop-rock album with just a few swirls of electronica.
But one wonders whether he's thrown out the baby with bath water, whether his retrospective songs are simply overblown nostalgia or the sound of an overly contented man retreating from the cutting edge.