Album reviews: Moby does downtempo beauty, while Olivia Rodrigo shows her goth soul
Moby is back with Reprise, while TV star Olivia Rodrigo debuts with Sour.
Moby’s reputation suffered a pummelling when his claim, in his autobiography, to have dated Natalie Portman was publicly disputed by the actress, who remembered Moby as a “much older man being creepy with me”.
The release of his latest album has very much unfolded in the shadow of that controversy. And so Moby fans will be forgiven for approaching it with a degree of diffidence. They will also have to ask themselves if music can ever be judged entirely on its merits.
But if are to assume for a moment that it can be then this is a gorgeous overview of Moby’s career, in which older hits are given an orchestral makeover courtesy of the Budapest String Quartet.
He’s lined up some enviable guest vocalists. Gregory Porter gives the mournful Natural Blues a spark of effervescence while Jim James’s take on Porcelain is even more downbeat than Moby’s original interpretation.
Though associated with Nineties rave, there is a case that Moby’s true talent is for down-tempo instrumentals. The point is reinforced with a heartbreaking The Everloving and a buffed-up God Moving Over The Face of the Waters, which famously played over the climactic closing scene in Michael Mann’s Heat. Twenty-six years on, it has lost none of its majestic ache.
Olivia Rodrigo is not your everyday teen star. She may have initially achieved fame as the lead in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (ask a tweenager). But her first album is closer in spirit to the gauzy melancholy of HBO’s Euphoria than to Disney + stodge.
This is pop with a goth soul. Rodrigo’s singing is by turns whispered, snarling, and brimming with angst. And the 18-year-old pairs it with an engagingly bleak selection of post-grunge guitars and menacing grooves.
Her influences clearly go beyond Disney musicals, too. Driver’s License, her ubiquitous smash from earlier in the year, is Lorde meets Radiohead, while Good 4 U splits the difference between Avril Lavigne and Riot Grrrl. It’s just one of many sublime moments on an effervescent debut.
