The payoff: his 1999 classic
Play, a deeply eccentric and garbled spiritual statement that nonetheless smashed through music-biz boundaries to find new audiences all over the world, eventually selling almost 10 million copies and gracing more TV commercials than Mr. Whipple. Jumping off from Fatboy Slim's "Praise You," Moby took ghostly old voices from blues and gospel folkways and remixed them into seductive new dance music. You had to worry that the sequel would beat the formula into the ground, turning ancient spirituals into ad jingles: "Nobody Knows the Arby's I've Seen," "Nike's Blood Never Failed Me Yet," "Colonel Sanders Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed" or "Oh, Lawdy, I'm Not Gonna Pay a Lot for This Muffler."
In addition to everything else it was, Play was a mess. Everybody remembers it for the blues-gospel techno pastiche of highlights such as "Natural Blues" and "Honey," but they added up to only one-third or so of the album. The rest of Play veered from somber New Age goop to metal-guitar blare to goth gloom to silly Paula Abdul-style mall disco (the freak hit "South Side"). That's the way Moby works: His 1996 Animal Rights was packaged as his metal move, but it was dominated mostly by such spacey keyboard doodles as "Love Song for My Mom" (and why hasn't Hallmark bought up that one yet?). Messes are Moby's thing, and the disjunct segue is his signature groove. So 18 is neither a retread of Play nor a departure from it. It's pop music the way Moby has always heard it: a frantic dance of different sounds and styles, banging into the wall a time or two but hitting sublimely beautiful highs along the way.
On 18, Moby turns up the vocals -- only a handful of tracks are old-school instrumentals. Understandably, he spends much of the album trying to re-create the gospel flavor of Play, but all the soulful diva action gets tiresome after a while. Despite gorgeous guest shots from Jennifer Price ("In This World") and the Shining Light Gospel Choir ("In My Heart"), there's too much vocal holleration and not enough songwriting to go around. The strongest tunes on 18 are the ones that hold bigger surprises, especially the beatific New Wave space oddity "We Are All Made of Stars." It sounds like a title that Ultravox or the Comsat Angels or somebody would have used in 1982, but it soars over a New Order-like guitar groove and Moby's modest voice. He sounds like an earnest young cleric scattering blessings over his flock, singing a love song to his new mass audience: "People, they come together/And people, the
Into the soundtrack for the chill-out generation, blending gospel vocals and blues hollers with down-tempo rhythms and glacial keyboard textures. But 18 B Sides + DVD finds the grandmaster of bedroom-recording melancholy turning his inspired approach into a formula. None of these tracks break any new ground. The pretty slow-glides blend almost too seamlessly, which is the point, but is it too much to ask for even one up-tempo groove to shake up the seventy-minute trance? After the artistic triumphs of Play (1999) and 18 (2002), B Sides sounds exactly as advertised: a collection of leftovers -- augmented by a DVD loaded with even more outtakes and live footage from this year's Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. -- that's strictly for Moby diehards.
