TORONTO - The last time I saw Moby, it was in 2002 along with some 8,500 fans at the Molson Amphitheatre.

The New Yorker had brought along his musical hero David Bowie to co-headline his Area2 fest, and Moby's own mainstream popularity was well-established because of the success of his 1999 monster release Play and the promising 2002 followup 18, which spawned hits like We Are All Made Of Stars and Extreme Ways.

My, how times have changed for Moby, who played to a fraction of that sized audience on Monday night at the Phoenix, even though it was, in fact, a sold-out show.

No longer the critics' darling -- his month-old new album, Hotel, has received mainly neutral to poor reviews -- he is still beloved by his hardcore fans, judging from the enthusiastic reaction to his two-hour-and-five-minute performance.

Moby and his four-piece band deserved their praise, despite an uneven night of music that concentrated mainly on material from Hotel and Play with the odd Led Zeppelin homage and Canadian cover thrown in (more on those later).

On the plus side: Moby's sheer eagerness to please, even though he was dealing with monitors that he said "sounded like wet blankets" and the occasional microphone feedback.

When he wasn't telling funny stories about growing up an audio-visual geek who wanted to be a scientist, he took the willing audience through his many musical phases while playing electric guitar, conga and bongo drums.

There was noisy punk, euphoric rave, reinvented blues and gospel, trashy disco, and electronic and synth-pop with Extreme Ways, Find My Baby, Go, Next Is The E, Porcelain, South Side, We Are All Made Of Stars, Honey, Bodyrock, and Feeling So Real emerging as the set highlights.

Moby's choice of covers was equally eclectic. He moved from Mission Of Burma's punk classic That's When I Reach For My Revolver -- from his own 1997 release, Animal Rights -- to Lou Reed's debauched anthem Walk On The Wild Side.

He also provided two noteworthy Canadian shoutouts with Leonard Cohen's Suzanne and Neil Young's Helpless. He also inserted some of Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love into Honey while later playing a tiny bit of Stairway To Heaven's guitar intro.

His powerful female vocalist Laura Dawn re-invented both old and new material, some songs more successfully than others.

For instance, Play's funky-soulful dance song, Natural Blues, was turned into a slow blues number that didn't work and wasn't nearly as fun as the original.

However, the quiet re-invention of New Order's Temptation, included on Hotel, worked in its own soft, intimate way.

Sadly, the abundance of new songs -- Raining Again, Spiders (inspired by his "deep, eternal and undying love for David Bowie"), Where You End, Dream About Me and Slipping Away -- often dragged the evening down when it had just started to get going.

Notable exceptions were the first North American single, Beautiful, the disco-drenched Very -- which Moby said was inspired by Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer circa 1978 -- and the first European single, Lift Me Up.