Moby Gets Loud

These Systems Are Failing is the newest album to come from Moby, under the lengthened name Moby and the Void Pacific Choir. These Systems are Failing is not a continuation but rather more a throw back one of his older albums, Animal Rights, and embraces some of his earlier punk influences.

“Hey Hey” starts everything off with a beat that gets right into it with a retro punk vibe. As the chorus comes around, more depth is added to not only the lyrics but also to the sound itself. “Break Doubt” comes off just as strong and keeps the energy going.

It is at about “I Wait For You” that the album starts to lose some of its edge. While this song tries to get even darker than the songs before it, synths starts to get muddled up until “A Simple Love” which stands out as it takes on a totally different tone. The album starts to brighten up a little and rather than keep pushing the anger of its punk influences, “A Simple Love” invokes a sense of longing and gives itself enough room to get quiet and introspective. After this, though, everything goes back to the way it was before and the album ends rather uneventfully.

These Systems Are Failing does have a consistent focus on the various systems in life that can eventually fail, whether it’s something small like a relationship or something larger like the music industry, but this album is not like others before it that have dealt with theses ideas, where these concepts are approached with an introspective, thought out, and a retrospective response. Instead Moby approaches these thems with anger about these failures. No thoughts, just emotions. Unfortunately, it sounds like that mindset might have been overly used in the technical production of this album. The first few songs get away with sounding intriguing as they introduce the revival of Moby’s punk past, but after that, those fuzzy synth lines start to blend together into white noise broken up by pre-made punk slogans. While These Systems Are Failing has a few bright points, when it comes to somebody of Moby’s caliber, more is to be expected.