Innocents

Moby's work since 1999's Play has tended to be singer-songwriter somnambulant, but Innocents suggests a way past it: working with others. It's still a Moby album – patient tempos, frosted with strings and comfortably melancholy melodies. But working with his first outside producer, Mark "Spike" Stent (Gaga, Beyoncé, Massive Attack), has made him knuckle down; the writing is sharper than on 2009's sketchy Wait for Me or 2011's overblown Destroyed. It helps that the guest vocalists – Mark Lanegan's sepulchral croak, Wayne Coyne's folksy grandiosity, Damien Jurado's reedy falsetto, Cold Specks' throaty croon – sound as committed as the auteur himself.