Moby - Lift Me Up

Track Review
Released: 2005
Download It (4.4MB)

Just when you thought that your favourite christian-vegan advertising whore had done the sensible thing and withered up and died, along comes the Mobester with a new single and a new album.

I can imagine the stunned look on the faces of the NMEs and Pitchforks of the world when this atom bomb of uncoolness drops onto their review desk - kinda like in those 80's frat-party movies when the class nerd turns up to a debaucherous drunken party with a Trivial Pursuit game under his arm.

What surprised me most about this is that Moby has dared to show his face in the public domain again after being royally murdered on wax by Eminem in 2002's epochal "Without Me" single. For those who need their memory refreshed:
"And Moby, you can get stomped by Obie,
You 36 year old bald headed fag blow me
You don't know me, you're too old, let go
It's over, nobody listens to techno"

Haha! Moby! It rhymes with "blow me"! Who knew? It was under our noses all that time... but it took our favourite trailer-trash rapping wunderkind to bring it to our attention.

(Now, I'm the first to admit that recently Em has turned into as big of a fuckturd as Moby, but back in '02 he was the Messiah preaching the gospel).

But I digress. Let's discuss the "music".

Well firstly, Moby can't fucken sing. Never could sing, and at age of 39, I'm not holding out for a sudden improvement. There's plenty of legendary artists who couldn't sing for shit (hendrix, dylan) but there's something about Moby's voice which really, really, grates on my nerves. It sounds like a .Net programmer singing karaoke. It's a proven historical fact the only good moby tracks are either a) instrumental b) using female vocalists c) ripping off old gospel and soul vocals.

Anyway, the bald-headed venereal-disease-carrying one has adeptly realised that 2002's turgid 18 album was a huge mistep, being a limp-wristed watered-down retread of 1999's gospel-sampling Play. So it's now 2005, and the Mobester is desperately trying to stay hep with the kids and follow the "new new wave" movement of bands such as franz, killers, bloc et al. Unfortunately for him, the production on this single makes it sound like an unholy alliance of b-grade Garbage and c-grade Pet Shop Boys.

So yep it ends up sounding as derivative and useless as you would expect; and the outro chorus of "Lift me up, oooh la la la la" is just downright embarrassing.

I'll let Moby himself sum up his new album: "I wrote between 200 and 300 songs over the past year and a half," he explained, "A lot of them weren't very good."

Coming to a chocolate bar / car / microsoft advertisement near you.

2/10