Niki N. Phaser

First of all, you should know that this is not your ordinary pop album, which has some upbeat songs, some ballads, opens with something up-tempo and ends with the longest song. This is not even your ordinary Moby album. There are no tracks here which will get played in Upper East Side hip clubs. No 1000 bpm. There are hardly any drums on it. This might as well be called Moby’s synth strings and pads album. There were signs of the coming of Wait for Me. Ambient instrumentals like the Intro from Hotel or My Weakness from Play would fit without any problems on this new collection. Wait for Me is also the kind of album which works really great if you listen to all of it. It’s a lot like a soundtrack, even the songs with voices.

From these, the stand-out is JLTF (not to be confused with JLTF-1), which in some ways sounds like a slow-motion Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad, and this, too, would make wonders on an indie movie set in a small town, where it always rains. You could include on the same movie Walk With Me and Wait for Me (on the end titles !). Moby himself makes only one vocal appearance on Mistake, which shows some resemblance with Slipping Away or Where You End from Hotel. As for his previous album, Last Night, this one could pass for a reaction to that. If that was the crazy Saturday night out, this one is the Sunday coffee at noon. Alone. Watching the rain falling on your window and making the world seem black and white. But in a good way.

There a few moody instrumentals, that are either too short or too weird to deserve their own titles (Stock Radio or JLTF-1). There is the already-overestimated-because-of-its-David Lynch-video Shot in the Back of the Head and the rather predictable Pale Horses. But you also get an instant classic like the brilliantly-titled A Seated Night, which has a Sunday Mass feel to it. It’s built on a sampled choral bit and then synths and synths and synth are added, with a minimal beat in the background. It sounds like Massive Attack doing a Christmas carol. But in a good way. Opener Division will make you wonder “for what movie did John Barry composed this?”, while Scream Pilots will take you back to 80’s or rather early 70’s new age, like Vangelis or Mike Oldfield.

If you weren’t just dying to dance on new tunes by Moby, you will not be disappointed by Wait for Me, especially if you listen to it when you are in the mood for such stuff. It’s that kind of album. If you feel depressed and want to listen to something that will cheer you up, don’t choose this. But if you want to add depth to that depression and make it an existential crisis (you know you sometimes want exactly that !), Wait for Me will do the trick. But in a good way.