Yah Moby There!

Seven million. It's a big number, but it's not the amount of "units" that Moby's Play had "shifted" worldwide by the end of December. You'll have to add another 200,000 to get that.

As unobjectionable as it was effective, Play was the music industry success story of 2000. Only a late surge of sales by The Beatles' 1 kept it from the Xmas number 1 spot in Britain, a full 17 months after its release. It's done 1.5 million over there, and a tenth of that in Ireland. In short, it's the dance album de nos jours for people who wouldn't step inside a drug-flooded club if you paid them.

Such has been the climate of consensus around Play that the neophyte listener, and there can't be too many of those left, could be forgiven for anticipating the dance equivalent of Sgt Pepper. Yet, once they'd stopped playing the "Hey, that's the one from the Nissan Almera ad!" game, they'd probably be struck by how mainstream and foursquare it is.

Several tracks aside ('Porcelain', 'Inside', and, if we're being generous, 'Honey') in dance music terms the envelope stays firmly unpushed, new ground remains resolutely unbroken. At times, it's strongly reminiscent of all the soporific trip-hop acts that swamped the coffee tables of Britain during the mid-1990s, in the wake of Massive Attack's second album and the debuts from Portishead and Tricky.

Play is much too well executed and too listenable to be a remotely bad record, but its three or four genuinely impressive tracks can't dispel the stifling air of play-it-safeness at its Gap-attired heart. Which, of course, is why it's done seven million while the new Orbital album will barely manage a twentieth of that.

Not that we should pretend that the majority of those Play CDs have found their way into the homes of people genuinely interested in dance music. For most people in the club scene, the last time Moby mattered was when he ignited Top Of The Pops in 1991 with the breathtaking 'Go'. Conversely, for rock critics (the loudest, most persistent champions of Play), he is essentially the pop ambassador for techno.

To these people, Play is essentially a dance album you can listen to like a regular rock record, albeit one without all those annoying squiggly noises and ten-minute tracks that segue into each other. It's pleasant, unobtrusive fuzak (fusion + muzak) - and, if we're being honest, blandly innocuous for the most part.

Let's examine it bit by bit. 'Honey' suffers from 'Rockafeller Skank' syndrome - brilliant track, best heard at fascistically loud volume, but soon wears thin; 'Find My Baby', all southern guitar and resolutely undanceable beats, screams "Beer commercial targeted at aspirational twentysomethings" from every note (despite research, I haven't managed to ascertain whether it has actually been put to that purpose); 'Southside' sounds like a brave but misguided attempt to mix rare groove and rock; 'Machete' is a bad knock-off of The Prodigy's 'Full Throttle'.

If we're going to be even-handed about this, it's undeniable that 'Porcelain' is a stone cold masterpiece and the album's one truly great song, a shimmervescent icicle of ghostly piano and armour-plated beats. Yet even this one falls victim to media signifier syndrome. Last summer, Eurosport played it non-stop to flag their Euro 2000 coverage. As a result, I can't hear its opening bars without visualising Luis Figo's long-range rocket against England in Eindhoven. There are worse things in life, one supposes…

Perhaps the most overexposed tracks on Play are the two Big Gospel Epics, 'Natural Blues' and 'Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?'. I may be dissecting them with excessive cynicism, but both cuts - all musty vocal samples and carefully layered keyboards - feel like calculated stabs at plugging into the interface of Ye Olde American Music and modern dance culture that Fatboy Slim utilised to such good effect on 1998's 'Praise You'. With less spectacular results.

Not that this is the only time he's nicked a good idea off Norman Cook: 'Bodyrock' is a pallid rip-off of the Brighton buccaneer's remix of 'Body Movin' by the Beastie Boys (a huge track in America but rarely heard here). And when he isn't on Fatboy Slim's case, he plagiarises himself: 'Run On' is a rather effective rewrite of 'Honey', while many of the later instrumentals (see below) are mutually indistinguishable.

'Porcelain' aside, so far so MOR. However, it's in the home stretch of the record that we get the strongest clue as to Play's success.

As anyone familiar with the genre knows, ambient music is characterised not only by its extreme quietude but by the protracted length of its tracks. Cleverly, Moby has kept each of the slow instrumentals on Play to four minutes maximum, in convenient bite-size morsels for those who would turn their noses up at a nine-minute Aphex Twin epic. Some, like '7' and 'Down Slow', are barely a minute long. This is chill-out music designed not for the comedown but for the dinner party.

It's here, shorn of the old-time blues vocals and suchlike, that Play is stretched thinnest. 'Rushing', all treacle-like swathes of keyboards and lifeless percussion, sounds like Richard Clayderman given the trip-hop treatment. The embarrassing spoken-wordisms of 'The Sky Is Broken', too, would barely pass muster as an Underworld B-side.

Mercifully, there's as yet no evidence that tracks from Play will be licensed out to advertise other records. We haven't heard the last of this monster, though - latest reports suggest that Elton John is to cover 'Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?'. And they said coffee tables weren't renowned for their durability…

Play is out now on Mute (although, let's face it, you already own a copy).