Moby: "Shot In The Back Of The Head"

Moby’s first hit consisted of a single word shouted over the Twin Peaks theme and some endearingly condensed dance beats. It only makes sense, then, that a career and a half later he’d be coming back home with an instrumental single that sounds like a movie theme, features a backward guitar line, and is completed with a music video of bona fide David Lynch animation, all pulsing scribbles and sketchy faces bringing out just the unsettling, itchy context his resolutely concise and wholesome soundscapes often benefit from.

Over the last eighteen years, Moby has fully ingrained the cinematics (if not the ominous opacity or occasional cheesiness) of Angelo Badalamenti’s David Lynch scores, to the point where, regarding the last few albums, he’s either been shitting them out indiscriminately or half-heartedly trying to scurry away from them into bland alt-rock and his neon rave roots. While Wait For Me, his Reznor/Radiohead move into self-release self-actualization, isn’t entirely successful, even for the resolutely uncool few who have kept on following him post Play (1999), it is a major step back on the right track, the variations on his classic themes jarring in their missteps and revelatory in their successes.

The secret to the satisfactory nature of “Shot In The Back Of The Head” seems to lie in the sheer simplicity of it, eschewing vocals (his or otherwise) in favor of a pure, shifting series of warm chords roughened up slightly by the reversed guitar and the unprocessed drums, then unrepentantly blissed out by Ken Thomas’s spacious mix and Moby’s commercial-ready synth/squalling lead guitar arrangement. It might be fussily slick NPR music for in between shows, but from this vantage point—reassessing the strengths of a major artist as he gives up the commercial ghost for a minute—it’s an impressive testament to finally realizing where one fits.