Moby: Hotel

Moby is many things to many people, but to his credit, boring is seldom one of those things. Though the bald-domed New Yorker's public persona suggests the exact opposite, his music over the past decade and change has at times compellingly resembled the work of someone fixated on the redemption of bad taste: the gloopy but genuinely affecting rave-soul of 1995's Everything Is Wrong, the bizarrely antiseptic thrash of '97's Animal Rights, the ingeniously reductive techno-gospel of '99's Play--whether it sold millions or dozens of copies, each of these records made a serious aesthetic commitment. That even includes "We Are All Made of Stars," the bad Bowie single from 2002's 18 that signaled a slight shift away from the sample-dependency that made him a rich little man.

This new Moby record is boring. The mode is "We Are All Made of Stars"--live instruments, "real" singing, a general high-fashion sci-fi vibe--but without hooks or ripping solos or textures not featured on the soundtracks of movies with words like "chronicles" or "Riddick" in their titles. The problem, sadly, is good taste. Throughout Hotel Moby sounds reluctant to rock the boat of lower-Manhattan wine-and-cheesing; they come to him for corny book-party ambiance, and he provides it.