694 Moby - Play (1999)

Studio Album - Electronic

About the Act:

So Moby's like this dude, right, from New York, and he like makes electronic music and is famously vegan. He's been doing the music since 1989 and I don't know how long he has been a Vegan. He has released 19 studio albums, and I couldn't possibly say how many animals he has not eaten. 

About the Album:

This was Moby's 5th album, and his breakthrough album, and his biggest hit album.

My History with this Album:

I have a copy of this but have not listened often. I know three of the tracks well as they were hits.

Review:

Music is never in isolation. There is a continuum, probably more than one. Electronic music started, well firstly I guess in the 50s, but significantly with the advent of synths in the 70s, into 80s synth-pop. There was an invention called a "sampler" which could make a digital recording of a real sound and play it back at different pitches, and one of the big proponents of this technology was The Art of Noise in the mid-80s. I'm bringing this up, because sampling became the heart and soul of electronic music from then on, and music described as "electronic" is very reliant on it. In the 90s, electronic and rave were intertwined and it became accepted that electronic was mostly dance, but that had not always been the case. Krautrock had morphed spacerock into ambient, and The Art of Noise had made a slow electronic track called "Moments in Love". 

Around the late 90s, around the time of this album, there was interesting things going on in this area, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Fat Boy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, Air, and Moby, all using samples to create electronic stuff that wasn't always dancy - downtempo and spacey sometimes, but not always. It is a rich area, and although a lot of the techniques are the same, this world is and was quite distinct from Hip-Hop and rap. And the thing about Moby that is different to these other acts I mentioned, is that he is American. I don't know who else in America did this sort of stuff, but in some ways I think he was out on his own.

Enough of the musical history lesson (very much through my own lens), and on to some description. These are tracks not songs, and mostly follow the electronic/ambient tradition of playing cycles (in this case usually 4 bars following a chord sequence) where things get added, altered, or taken away for each cycle, so it slowly evolves. The sounds used are varied, there are some huge pad sounds, often strings, bass of varying kinds, sometimes that deep bass that can only really be electronic. Drums and percussion come in some tracks, and when they do they tend towards the funky-soul end of things (for some reason I keep thinking of The Happy Mondays with these beats). There is some superb tambourine use (trust me to notice that) and there are vocal samples, mostly seemingly from old black music, of the gospel sort of era. There are some spoken vocals and occasional sung vocals that may not be samples, and there are real instruments in here as well. The upbeat tracks are danceable, but not all are, and some are quite mellow.

So, I think the key to success in this sort of music is not just to do things randomly, but to create a pleasing feeling of movement, with interesting textures and elements coming in and out. One particular feature of this album is Moby's harmonic savvy, where the chord sequences he uses are often not ones you would imagine the sung samples had originally, but are ones that work with what is being sung. I think the other key with this stuff is to get the number of repetitions of the samples (especially the vocal samples) so that it sticks in the head, but is not so much it is irritating.

I enjoyed the album quite a lot. I don't remember it well, so I cannot have played it much. One thing I found interesting is that I enjoyed the tracks I didn't know well more than the tracks I did, which is unlike normal. I think that this is about repetition and annoyance, and I found the tracks I did know somewhat irritating because I have heard them too often, and they are quite repetitive.

So, it's a good album, it's surprisingly varied. A few tracks near the end felt like unfinished ideas that could have had more development, and I wondered if the composition of the album as an album could have been better.

7.3/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1xB1tmm50ZhXwrNs89u7Jx

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjIuADMrDKIb02mWFp531a-4CS1svs0uG

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(Moby_album)