BSPH: Moby - Face It

"Face It" is a song by Moby. It was released in 1996 on an album "Animal Rights". Nobody cares about this song. It is strange - this is the album Moby himself is proud of and yet it is so obscure. It came from a difficult time when Moby was battling personal problems and going through family issues. This comes through every song on the record. In some way "Face It" is a vertical slice showcase of "Animal Rights" - it combines brutal thrashing and haunting calm, pushes you through the thick fog of hopelessness and despair pierced by vicious screams.

"Face It" is long and somewhat meandering song that goes places and hits hard when comes around. It is very visceral sonically unusual and raw emotional song from a man who built his career on melodramatic and sentimental tunes. It is a highlight of "Animal Rights". Structurally "Face It" consists of five parts. It is a rollercoaster song. It begins with quiet guitar strumming where Moby declares the initial state of things. It may seem pretentious at first sight but the way it is delivered is genuinely sincere. Lyrics are about a burn-out described in a form of creepy abusive relationship. You can't go on as if nothing happened without breaking yourself and so you need to face the facts, get over it and move on - slowly but surely.

Then things explode with heavily distorted, monotonous solid rocking bone crushing thundering dutch angle stomp. The beat is so crushing it is more like the waves crashing on the wall than regular 4x4. Moby screams the hell out of himself - just as Tears for Fears prescribed. Then things take a little U-Turn with a tender tickling fuzz solo backed by dreamy pads - it feels like a breath of fresh air. But then we back to the ugly part which pummels into submission once again. This evolves into another solo. This time it is fuzzed to the treble sizzling hiss and is more in style of Joe Satriani if he was part of Faith No More. It is goes down - descends into the parts murky. It is really effective in telling the songs story - desperate, long and winding process of "getting through" or "facing it". This bit easily fits right after piano coda of "Epic". However in the end it just goes nowhere. After bludgioning ears with sipping noise - the song just halts and phases out of an arrangement leaving the drums to go on for some time before stopping. After that we get another gulp of ambient feedback noises and that's it.

It is obvious that on "Face It" Moby tried to pull off the "Fugazi maneuver" of making tight knot seem to be loose knit. But for some reason he purposefully missed the mark and went into bizarro-version of Weezer "Pinkerton" instead. Which is in turn performed with a tenacity of a Weird Al Yankovic style parody. And all this happens with a relatively straight face. It is too much. And that is why "Face It" works. While other songs on "Animal Rights" suffer from various stages of underwriting and lack of polish - "Face It" strikes a perfect balance between jam-like wandering and raw "anything goes" blow-off.