Year after year, Moby would return to Chicago and draw the same 1,000 faithful to his performances at clubs such as Metro and House of Blues. Occasionally, he’d deejay for the late-night crowd at a local disco. He was a respected cult figure who made terrific, if sometimes confoundingly confoundedly diverse records, that stretched the definitions of terms such as techno, rock, gospel, hip-hop and ambient music — often combining them into alluring, previously unimaginable shapes.
But since he last headlined a Chicago club last year, Moby has become a platinum artist, thanks to the slow-build success of his 1999 album, “Play,” and over the weekend, his audience had increased nine-fold to fill the Aragon twice over. So when he stood atop the monitors Friday bathed in white light and cried, “Let’s get to heaven!,” the audience responded with a roar befitting Queen at Wembley Stadium, circa 1977.
This tour is something of a victory lap for the shaven-headed imp, whose music first gained massive exposure not through traditional outlets such as commercial radio and MTV, but as background music for car and department-store commercials. Even taken out of context, Moby’s mood music struck a universal nerve with its evocative chord changes and minor-key melodies.
As a home-studio auteur, Moby makes deeply personal records in which he crafts wondrous soundscapes with guitars, drums and keyboards, while singing like a fragile recluse. His most potent songs often feature guest vocalists, or voices sampled from old blues and gospel records. In translating that music to the stage, Moby and his rhythm section often sounded like the backing band for a pre-recorded lead voice.
But with the addition of powerhouse diva Diane Charlemagne, Moby’s concerts at the Aragon reached a new emotional plateau. The show peaked whenever she and Moby collaborated, particularly on the heartbreak hymn “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” and then on a slow-burn gospel-folk rendition of “Feeling So Real” that burst into disco overdrive.
Still, for first-time Moby fans, the show might have been bewildering. Here was a garrulous Everyfan decidedly dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt, sprinting from keyboards to congas to the drum riser as though ODing on espresso. He played coffeehouse acoustic guitar, jacked his body in thrall to a house-music kick drum, dipped into the placid waters of a Philip Glass-like instrumental piece, and rejiggered the “James Bond Theme” as a neo-metal anthem. Even when standing center stage, his hands fidgeted as though he were shaping an unseen clay sculpture out of the microphone stand.
Here is an artist who doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, and likes it that way, sometimes contradicting himself along the way. Bubbling with stream-of-consciousness energy between songs, he declared that it was his secret desire to play guitar with heavy-metal titans Pantera, then the next instant he was deriding “depressing old rock music.” Moby began his musical journey in the mid-’80s as a hard-core punk, and he occasionally drifted back to that time for inspiration. But his guitar-based music is nothing particularly special; he’s a limited vocalist, and the bashing of drummer Scott Frasetto tended to overwhelm the other instruments.
Where Moby excels is in a less clearly defined space between ambient electronic music and Nick Drake-like melancholy. He reconfigured several tunes as solitary guitar ballads, including “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die” and the gorgeous “Porcelain,” which sounded even more desolate stripped of its swooning keyboards. But Moby has never shied from the grand gesture, and he ended his Friday performance as he has virtually all of his concerts since the early ’90s: standing shirtless atop a keyboard, arms raised as the impossibly fast rhythms of “Thousand” engulfed him. It was less a case of a rock star towering above his legions than of a dedicated fan losing himself once again in the music.
