Say what you will about Moby, but the guy's always been good for throwing his audience a left-handed curveball. Back in the mid-90s, when it seemed safe to assume he was about as popular as he was likely to get, Richard Melville Hall followed up his mostly Eurodance-inspired Everything Is Wrong with a grunge record, then followed that with a disc of film scores and a full-on ambient record under the bastard alias Voodoo Child. So when Play dropped back in '99, the oddly infectious mix of scratchy old blues recordings, MIDI keyboards and programmed drums seemed like an intriguing development in Moby's sound-- but no one dared assume it would become his sound. Anyone living within ten miles of a TV or radio pretty much knows the story from here. Idealistic hipster trades actual idealism for the 2-D MTV version that-- it turns out-- pays a helluva lot better, inadvertently scores two-thirds of commercials produced in the following three years, and oh yeah, there's that whole international superstar thing.

If the threat of never achieving massive superstardom never frightened Moby into fitting his music into a mold, then the actual attainment of superstar status has. As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally. So, yes, in case you were wondering, 18 does sound a lot like Play-- almost song-for-song, in fact. But any manager can tell you that the best way to achieve commercial success is to Stick With What Works. Here, Moby shows us why he's a star and not a starmaker-- by actually sampling from the same sources! Couldn't get enough of that chanteuse shrouded in tape hiss who sings, "Ooh Lordy, troubles so hard," on that Pentium III commercial? Well, here's another one just like her, singing, "Lordy, don't leave me all by myself." See? Different. For "In My Heart," Moby sets a crackly old gospel singer against piano lines that way too closely recall the ones on "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" (which, by the way, was already a mere variation on a Philip Glass piece).

There's plenty more to dislike about 18, like the monotonous thumps of already-dated drum machines, the painfully repetitive nature of so many of these sounds, or the simplistic keyboard noodling in the background of half these songs. Or inconsequential lyrics like those in the opening track ("People may come together/ And people may fall apart/ No one can stop us now/ 'Cause we are all made of stars"), or those that serve as the refrain to "Extreme Ways" ("Oh baby, oh baby, then it fell apart, it fell apart"). But we're veering dangerously close into the realm of personal taste, and I see no reason to reduce my argument to aesthetics, when I know that tons of people get off on this kind of cheese. But there's plenty of stuff wrong with 18 that's much harder to debate-- stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with my personal likes and dislikes.

For one, 18 is such a blatantly commercial affair I can't help but feel pandered to. Any pretext of cohesiveness is crushed under the heel of A&R;'s blatant attempts to sell this album to as many demographics as humanly possible. There's an indie rock song ("Great Escape," featuring would-be scenesters Azure Ray doing their best Mimi-from-Low impression), a hip-hop song ("Jam for the Ladies," featuring Angie Stone and MC Lyte), and, worst of all, a weepy adult contemporary-friendly slow jam featuring none other than Sinead O'Connor (actual so-sappy-I-fell-off-my-chair-and-broke-my-tailbone-laughing lyric: "The sadness flows like water and washes down the heartache").

Those songs that aren't graced by guest appearances all sound crafted from the same mold-- Play-style sampled blues and gospel set to the same sort of cornily uplifting ambient soundscapes and basic keyboard noodlery Moby's been mucking around with for years-- though it sounds less inspired now than ever. For an album three years in the making, 18 sure does sound like it was tossed together at the last minute. It would seem Moby's artistic growth has been stunted by his suddenly packed social schedule. One gets the feeling from the songs on 18 that Moby's more interested in introducing music videos and being unfunny with Winona Ryder on Saturday Night Live than he is in making music.

The only thing that differs from Moby's former work here are the liner notes. Before Play, Moby had earned a reputation for the well-crafted, often persuasive essays he included with each album. He damned cultural conservatism, cigarettes, celebrity and fundamentalism, while promoting an agenda of conservation, vegetarianism, and animal and prisoner rights. 18 has merely two essays: one about the difficulty of writing essays and the process of creating the album at hand, the other politely suggesting that everybody be nice to each other. Can someone please explain to me why, in a time when Moby's voice is louder than ever, and when cultural conservatism and fundamentalist dogma aims to destroy what few freedoms we as a nation have left, Moby would choose to back down?

Maybe MTV built an android Moby with the remarkable ability to look cute in Pumas and to pilfer through the real Moby's back catalog and rearrange samples. It seems farfetched, but I'd rather suspend some disbelief than deal with the knowledge than such an idealistic guy could be so easily corrupted by the system he once seemed to fight against. Everything is wrong, indeed.

-David M. Pecoraro, May 20th, 2002