*** Moby

PLAY

(V2)

The perfect beat can save your life, no doubt. But who will say-eee-ave your soul? Some superstar DJ with two fistfuls of ecstasy on his tour rider and values as transitory as the presets on his sampler? Moby can't get with that, so he's spent the past few years treating his record crates like a musical-epiphany search engine, fumbling for transcendence through slow-ebbing minimalism (his waiting-for-God-in-the-chill-out-room album The End of Everything) and confounding hardcore (Animal Rights -- that's when I reached for my Lithium).

On Play, he does something only a spiritual searcher who admits to buying most of his records at Tower can -- he digests the boxed set version of Alan Lomax's Anthology of American Folk Music, introducing chain-gang sex raps to deep-house comedowns, garagy hip-hop to field hollers, ex-slaves to post-rave. It's a slick pop that acknowledges its own gritty DNA the way pop seldom does. "Honey," a British hit in '98, is Delta-blues body rock, Moby's own "James Bond Theme" re-remixed for electric-sliding; "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" gives a preacher man the mike while Moby's music-for-airports surges up behind him going ,"Yo, I feel you, man." Our hero even does some endearingly affectless singing of his own, crooning like a Pet Shop Boy on the summer-ready "Southside" and echoing fellow world-breakbeat eccentrics Byrne and Bowie on tracks like "The Sky Is Broken," whispering apologies while the century becomes another piece of loopable history.

-- Alex Pappademas