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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
Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News. He is always working on the next installment of the Albums of the Year series at TMN. You can and follow his Twitter updates here.
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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