Moby: 18 B Sides : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Into the soundtrack for the chill-out generation, blending gospel vocals and blues hollers with down-tempo rhythms and glacial keyboard textures. But 18 B Sides + DVD finds the grandmaster of bedroom-recording melancholy turning his inspired approach into a formula. None of these tracks break any new ground. The pretty slow-glides blend almost too seamlessly, which is the point, but is it too much to ask for even one up-tempo groove to shake up the seventy-minute trance? After the artistic triumphs of Play (1999) and 18 (2002), B Sides sounds exactly as advertised: a collection of leftovers -- augmented by a DVD loaded with even more outtakes and live footage from this year's Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. -- that's strictly for Moby diehards.