Moby
18
V2

After the remarkable success of Play, it should surprise no one that Moby filled his follow-up, 18, with a lot of the same devices: gospel vocals, haunting ambient melodies, hip-hop overtones. He'd be stupid not to. After all, Play sold 10 million albums and its tracks graced everything from teen-movie soundtracks to Volkswagen ads.

And while there are parts of 18 that are a little too much like Play for comfort, the album is remarkable for all the ways that it out-Plays Play. Moby has taken the elements that made his previous album a winner and deepened them, made better use of them to come up with a record that succeeds as often as it retreads.

For most of his career, Moby has been a strident innovator — a quick look at the vast difference between the high-end ambient tracks of Everything Is Wrong and its follow-up, the punk/grunge heavy Animal Rights tells you this is a guy who's not interested in treading the same path twice. But his tendency to rewrite also belied a nagging dilletantism, a feeling that Moby may be decent at a lot of things but not very good at creating a consistent sound. 18 proves otherwise: It's both a step beyond the musical themes of Play and a maturation of them. If anything, 18 is a combination of the best of Play and his previous Everything Is Wrong — the piano work that begins "In my Heart," for instance, is almost exactly the same as the plaintive plinks that sustain Everything's "God Moving over the Surface of the Waters." It expands quickly, though, into low and midlevel strings over a dance beat and a gospel refrain. Similarly, "Signs of Love" begins with the same strings as Everything's "Into the Blue," yet they are soon overtaken by Moby's voice, slightly modulated to give it a fuzzy, Richard Butler-esque quality.

In fact, if there's one thing that singles out 18 from the rest of the Moby stable, it's his voice. On his earlier albums, Moby's voice always seemed like a gimmick; he sang mostly on the punk pieces, and even on Play, when he trotted it out for a number of spoken-word tracks and the radio favorite "South Side," it was a bit of a novelty. But on 18, he lets it fly with such tracks as "Extreme Ways" and the first single, "We Are All Made of Stars" (though "Sleep Alone," another spoken/sung piece, is possibly the weakest on the album, if only because it sounds like a Play B-side).

At the same time, there are elements of 18 that have no forbearance in the Moby discography. "Great Escape," a cello-and-violin piece co-written and performed by Athens, Ga.'s duo Azure Ray, is beautiful, somber and so completely unlike the dance/gospel pieces from Play, or anything before it, that you'd never guess it was Moby behind it all. All the female vocals on 18 — and there are a lot of them — are inspired, from the sampled Sylvia Robinson on "Sunday" to Sinead O'Connor on "Harbour."

18 is clearly intended to appeal to the same folks who snarfed up Play, but it's hard to see the album as anything like a pandering repeat of past successes. Moby has settled into what he's good at — mixing touching female vocals (such as Dianne McCaulley on "One of these Mornings") with dance beats that counterpose his often-forlorn lyrics. But what really makes the album great is how much Moby has settled into himself — his lyrics and his voice show a side of him we've never seen.

Virtually every song on the album is a gem, and whereas Play gets derivative and boring by the last few tracks, 18 goes strong all the way — "I'm not Worried at All," the last song, has a slow-dance, end-of-the-sock-hop feel, lightly distorted, with snippets of what sounds like, surprise, a gospel choir popping in the background. It's a great way to end the album, as much a summation of its themes as a reminder that Moby can fill a record with strong, innovative pieces, right to the end.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)