18

1	We Are All Made Of Stars
2	In This World
3	In My Heart
4	Great Escape
5	Signs Of Love
6	One Of These Mornings
7	Another Woman
8	Fireworks
9	Extreme Ways
10	Jam For The Ladies
11	Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday)
12	18
13	Sleep Alone
14	At Least We Tried
15	Harbour
16	Look Back In
17	The Rafters
18	I'm Not Worried At All

Barnes & Noble

With 18, Moby's white whale of successful, intelligent, Top 40 pop is ready for the harpooning. The electronica superstar clearly designed 18 as a follow-up to his 1999 breakthrough, Play, which combined smart sampling, hip electronics, and remarkable melody. This time around, he raises the bar for "commercial music" even as he turns the knobs down on the club music passion that once was his muse. 18 is dominated by the sound of ambient, lounge-tronic drones -- music by and for maturing souls in modern times. Only the old-skool hip-hop-minded "Jam for the Ladies," featuring soulstress Angie Stone and MC Lyte, and "The Rafters," an effortlessly catchy ambient-pop-house track with a blues-moan hook, come within spitting distance of a surprising groove. Instead, the album's almost wistful recollections find Moby reflecting on his indie-rock youth. How else to explain "We Are All Made of Stars," a mellow, rocking guitar chugger that channels Pavement via Blur, or the ladies of Athens, Georgia's, Azure Ray harmonizing in hushed tones above the voice-and-strings dread of "The Great Escape." As Play accomplished so successfully, 18 creates a musical bridge between a melancholy past and an emotion-soaked present -- whether through the striking combination of looped piano arpeggios and the Shinning Light Gospel Choir on the uplifting "In My Heart" or the ambience invoked by a flute and a piano on the lovely, instrumental "Fireworks." Even Sinéad O'Connor's vocal turn comes on a track ("Harbour") that simultaneously invokes Nirvana's primal unplugged recordings and a pastoral, wide-chord futurism. With the thoughtful, enchanting songs on 18, Moby creates a grown-up Top 40 sound, where blues, new age, minimalism, house, and alt-rock all make the charts. Piotr Orlov

All Music Guide

In one of the two essays in the liner notes for 18, Moby alludes to his past as a "rigid" idealist about life and music, expressing that he's tried to open himself and hoping that he's succeeded. In a way, he already succeeded with his previous album, Play, a remarkable record that cannily used field recordings and blues as the basis for an expert set of modern electronica -- through repeated exposure (every song was licensed for a commercial or a movie) and sheer hard work, it became a massive hit, unlike most albums in its genre, establishing Moby as one of the few electronica superstars. It also gave him the freedom to make a record as meditative and assured as 18, a quietly seductive set that capitalizes on his status as a star in the sense that he takes complete freedom to make music that isn't necessarily hip. Essentially, this is a lateral move away from Play, abandoning its attention-grabbing musical thesis of turning the past into the present -- there are still hints of roots music, yet they're usually telegraphed through soulful vocals that have always been a staple of house and dance music -- and returning to his bedrock of dance and electronic music, yet presented with the skill he illustrated on Play, a new open-heartedness and, yes, a maturity previously unheard in his music. Maturity is often seen as a death-knell criticism, especially in a perpetually fashion-conscious genre like electronica, but this is only a good thing here, because it means that Moby not only creates a shimmering, reflective mood from the outset, but that he sustains it throughout the 18 songs, as the album shifts from pop and soul songs to soaring instrumental stretches, letting the sound deepen and change colors with each new track. Cynics could snipe and say this is coffeehouse, yuppie electronica or claim that he's done nothing new with this record, and they'd be right only in the coldest, literal sense that it would appeal to upscale urban listeners and that he's not really breaking new ground, only consolidating his strengths. Yet that is no small thing -- he has created a record that might not be as wildly eclectic on the surface as Play, and it certainly lacks club hits on the level of "Bodyrock" or "South Side," but it's a warm, enveloping, humanistic record with real emotional resonance, which surely is a noteworthy artistic step forward. Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Entertainment Weekly

On 18, [Moby] returns to what made Play work. Once again, he takes voices both new and vintage and loops them over fertile electronic arrangements that start sparely and blossom... It's a formula, but damn if it isn't still effective. A- David Browne