The Morning News

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Currently: pro-perversions
Today’s Feature: “Press 1 for Arabic” by Gigi Douban
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Albums

DJ Shadow, Private Press

This, the long-awaited follow-up to 1996’s monumental Endtroducing…, was worth it. Worth every month, worth every day. It’s catchy, it’s…

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Andrew Womack
TMN Co-Editor in Chief Andrew Womack lives in Austin, Texas. He co-founded The Morning News with Rosecrans Baldwin in 1999 and hasn’t been away from a computer for more than six hours since. You can .
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This, the long-awaited follow-up to 1996’s monumental Endtroducing…, was worth it. Worth every month, worth every day. It’s catchy, it’s spontaneous, it’s gorgeous. (Again) Shadow generates tracks that utterly defy categorization. It’s definitely more mature and there are a number of instances where the genres and influences that have been churned up over the last six years make a subtle appearance, from ‘60s troubadour (‘Six Days’) to, uh, word jazz (‘Mashin’ on the Motorway’) to hair-metal vocals (‘Blood on the Motorway’) to ‘80s electro (‘You Can’t Go Home Again’—a standout track). And all the while never using any of the samples to poke fun at a genre—Shadow instead consistently uses cuts where they fit, reworking their meaning, standing them beside something else to highlight what really was so good about that sample. Nothing is lost.

Delicately mashed together, lovingly mixed up, and in absolutely every way not a rehash of Endtroducing…, Private Press only further confirms DJ Shadow’s interpretive brilliance.

—Published June 20, 2002