The Strange Breezes
Music Review
Moby
"18"
For those of you who heard “Play”
and fell in love with Moby’s work instantaneously, loved the funky
groovy wondrous beat layered over vocals from an age gone by, loved the
delicate dreamy sadness of “Porcelain” and “My Weakness”, and just
plain loved “South Side”, I have news. The feeling, if not the
subject, of “Play” is much similar to a whirlwind romance. The
kind where you stay up talking all night and walk in the rain and
generally have a wonderful time. “18” is like real love, and
about real love. “18” is about what happens after you have
gotten past the stay up all night talking phase and have comfortable
silences.
“Play” had this instant animal attraction for me, and it is, in my
opinion, one of the most landmark artistic efforts produced in our
time. You would have had to have been in some sort of sensory
deprivation chamber for the past few years to have not heard at least a
snippet of one of the songs from it. And, probably, you liked what
you heard. Now you’re probably hearing the first single from “18”
– “We Are All Made Of Stars” – and thinking, hey, “18” might
be like “Play: Part Deux”. I’m sorry, but no. Don’t
underestimate Moby that much please.
For me, “18” took about ten times, listening all the way through, to
really get it. Maybe I’m dense but I’d like to attribute it more
to the fact that I was at work for most of those and most of my brainpower
was diverted at the time. Now, I had heard Moby before “Play”,
back in my college radio days. I won’t pretend I was a rabid fan
at the time, but I thought his stuff was pretty cool, and I played it here
and there. As I said above, “Play” was what really caught my
attention and caused instant me to become an instant fan. So, when I
was given “18” as a gift, I couldn’t wait to listen to it. I
popped into the brand new DVD home entertainment surround sound thingy my
fiancée just bought, sat back, and listened. We had company coming
over so I didn’t have time to listen to the whole album then, and didn’t
really formulate much of an opinion other than, well, this definitely isn’t
“Play” all over again.
There is no point in recounting my attempts to listen to “18” at
work. Skip ahead to listening number ten or so, back home with the
home entertainment system, and it hit me. This is an amazing
album. This is about love, about relationships, about the ups,
downs, salvation, dissolution, beginning, ending, middles, relationships
with others, yourself, your family, your notion of a higher being, but
mostly about love, the things we do for love, in the name of love, in
spite of love, the things we do to ourselves and others in relationships,
both good, bad, and blameless.
Moby makes a request in an essay written for this album. He asks
that the listener listen to it the whole way through at least once.
He says, “When I make a record I try to craft something that’s a
cohesive whole created from a bunch of different songs.” He has
succeeded. The songs are all beautiful, and can stand on their
own. But together, they do tell a story, and so it really is worth
listening to the whole thing, start to finish, more than once.
My favorite picks from “18”: “We Are All Made of Stars”,
which almost foreshadows the subject matter of the rest of the
album. “Signs of Love” and “Extreme Ways” are both beautiful
and truthful and groovy cool at the same time. “At Least We Tried”
is just sheer tenderness, beauty, and sadness mixed. All of them are
very very good, but if I had to pick, that’s what I’d pick.
To me, real love is something earned by being in the trenches.
Whether you’re learning to love yourself or you have a relationship or
you’re branching out into the metaphysical, there are fights and
make-ups, there are moments of doubt, and there are moments of wonderful
bliss. This is a collection of songs to fit those times, and it is
beautiful.
~Danielle from Charlottesville VA