Back in the last century, the world’s favourite vegan released PLAY, an album that caught the zeitgeist and shifted millions of copies. It was and remains an excellent album blending old blues samples with Moby’s haunting lyrical delivery and impressive musicianship. However, to those people in the music industry who consider it a crime to download music for free from the internet, could I just ask is it not also a crime to get people to pay for an album and then sell every track on it to advertising companies so that it becomes impossible to listen to the album without thinking about shiny people with shiny teeth drinking coffee or driving around in their new car or generally engaging in serial buzz-wrecking for those of us who just appreciate music? Bill Hicks may have been a smoker but he got some things right.

So what’s the beef with Moby’s new album then? According to the sleeve notes, Moby called this album Hotel because hotels fascinate him – the whole transience of the concept of staying in a bedroom that is miraculously cleaned and polished so that everyday we feel as if we are the first person to stay there. (Hmmmm, obviously Moby no longer has to rely on the Budget section of the Rough Guide).

Essentially we appear to be back in PLAY territory here although that is no bad thing. There are no blues samples in fact very little sampling at all. All the songs have been written by Moby except for two (Where You End and Temptation). Also he plays all the instruments himself which means he has an unfeasibly large number of hands or else he’s spent a lot of time in the studio (probably the latter). The album starts with an instrumental piece of wallpaper – no doubt peeled from the wall of some hotel (why can’t he just steal the towels like the rest of us?). Then we get down to the good stuff – Raining Again and Beautiful are good upbeat numbers with Moby’s distinctive vocals complementing the music very well. There’s a re-mix friendly song by the name of Lift Me Up which has some strange drums that sound like Erasure were in the booth next door when they were laying it down [Editor’s note: a track which has already made its way into an advert – in Italy at least].

A feature of this album is the use of Laura Dawn on lead vocals on three tracks and also duetting with Moby on another one (Dream About Me). For me these are the weakest numbers on the album and for no other reason than the fact that Moby’s music appears best when accompanied by his own dry lyrical voice. While Laura Dawn is an excellent singer I just don’t think her voice is quite right for the music. Anyway that’s not a major complaint. Moby gets back into cinematic sweep mode with Love Should which is a beautiful track with a marvellous piano backing and once again his vocals add to the mood of the piece as is the case on Forever also. The last couple of numbers (including a bonus track) are instrumentals – obviously he still had some of that wallpaper left.

Overall, this album is worth a look – not as ground-breaking as PLAY perhaps but hopefully less likely to feature on all those advertisements for things we never knew we wanted. And if you really like your wallpaper, then I suggest you purchase the special edition version of the album that comes with an Ambient CD – 70 minutes of pure flock magic.