Consumer Guide Album

Moby: Animal Rights [Elektra, 1997]
To his credit, the hustling little visionary didn't go for an ingratiating follow-up. With the vocals proffering all the human comfort of a loony bin, the hortatory punk with which he betrays his appointed calling assails the central nervous system even more abrasively than his electroraves did. I mean, why do you think they call both styles hardcore? But on the one-CD U.S. version the calmer techno his U.K. label relegated to a bonus disc cuts the speed-rock sex and desperation, so that the two musics enrich and play off each other with the flow and coherence Everything Is Wrong lacks (meaningfully, perhaps by design, but lacks nevertheless). "Alone" wouldn't assuage the way it does if just minutes earlier he hadn't been swearing "When you're fucking me it powers up my soul" in his best messiah-cum-ubermensch monotone. A−