Throwback: Moby - Play

Cast your minds back to 1999 , Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake started dating , the legendary movie Fight Club was released , I was 1 and Moby released one of his best albums ever, Play.

Richard Melville Hall , stage name Moby is an American DJ, singer, songwriter, musician, photographer and animal rights activist. He was born in Harlem in 1965 , He gained the nickname Moby from his parents as his middle name is the same as the Moby Dick author Herman Melville and supposedly the author was supposedly Moby's great-great-great-grand uncle.

Play was the fifth studio album from electronic musician Moby , although a lot of Mobys earlier work gained him commercial success in the EDM world, Play was able to gain success from every side both commercial and underground. This album was a breaking point for Moby's career, it introduced him into a the worldwide stage pulling away from the underground scene with TV and movies using Tracks from the album, noteworthy examples are The X Files, Gone In 60 Seconds and The Beach. With these factors and more it lead to the album sending over 12 million copies worldwide.

The album consist of 18 tracks giving a total listening time of 63:03. The whole album features many samples from folk, gospel and blues music this can be heard in the opening track "Honey" which is a strong song to start the album off with, its up beat and feels kind of funky.The song is built around samples of blues singer Bessie Jones's 1960 song "Sometimes". Moby himself has said  that the vocals on this track are meant to "convey female sex."

Everloving takes a change of pace , it opens with a single acoustic guitar slowly adding more instruments giving a real intensity to the track . the first time I heard this track i just stopped, it is such a simple song but it is so powerful for what it is. This track demonstrates the brilliants of Moby , he is able to capture such powerful emotion and thought without the use of a single lyric its pure instrumental on this track which usual i can't stand but this is pure brilliance.

Another hot track on the  album is Bodyrock , it starts off with a kind of B-boy vibe , like a track you could hear in a Step up movie.But in saying that the guitar gives a rock sound to the sound, it has a similar feeling to walk this way by Run DMC and Aerosmith the way the two genres mix but this track obviously has the EDM influence added.

I haven't really listen to Moby before I wrote this article so I won't pretend to be an expert on him , his works or his genre, one of the few things I do know about is good music , and that is what this album is good music. Moby was able to take from the past with his sampling and mix it with his own style creating something new something breathtaking, and when someone brings something new to the table like this it not only pushes the genre forward but also music as a whole so you can love it or hate it but a very least you have to respect it.