DJ Shadow: classic or dud?

I can’t recall exactly what tracks I liked off private press, I just remember the drums being sick as fuck

some of the longer tracks on preemptive strike are so good

in/flux

prefer the Headz version to the Pre Emptive Strike one

i like both!

Everybody otm. I also like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RFtLELeXVU

This is v good fun too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfmpeo85IMs

http://www.waxpoetics.com/blog/features/gallery/dj-shadow-begins/

I'll defend the Private Press and its surrounding b-sides/remixes.

Ultimately it was disappointing, but how could he have possibly improved on Endtroducing? That being said, I've always thought 'Six Days' and 'Blood on the Motorway' are as good as anything from Endtroducing.

I’m not brimming with confidence that this is a broadly applicable opinion and it probably wouldn’t have been possible anyway, but: I feel like if Shadow had been able to put out Psyence Fiction as his sophomore album (instead of a friendly jumpstart for James Lavelle’s solo project that Lavelle would largely fail to build on) then The Private Press would’ve been a perfectly acceptable third record. His audience would have gotten the Endtroducing sound but bigger, more lavish, and with special guests, and they’d be looking for the kind of differences that Private Press offered instead of clamoring for the former thing from a record that didn’t have it. I’m not saying it would’ve necessarily prevented the panic spiral that constituted the next decade or so of his career, but he’d at least have been in a better headspace to avoid it.

All of this of course being predicated upon my (admittedly not universal) opinion that Psyence Fiction lives up to the weighty reputation of Endtroducing, but even given the less charitable takes on that record I think it’d survive the sophomore-record scrutiny better than The Private Press did.

That's a good point, psyence was definitely a transitional record

does he still do a quick break in the middle of organ donor to do it "live" by having the different organ notes on different sampler pads? it's one of those ideas that is so goofy that it worked

This remix is also pretty essential

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYE2x3gVMuM

Private Press still my favorite in 2018

― change display name (Jordan), Monday, March 12, 2018 4:22 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

100% agree ... it's the only DJ Shadow album that I still listen to.

Shadow also deserves a lot of credit for his work as a funk/breaks DJ imo, and as far as I can tell he was kind of on the leading edge of the whole rare funk thing that blew up later.

i mean, rap producers were, lol but yeah

man alive otm

dj shadow / cut chemist - freeze dvd is an essential document as well

I highly recommend listening to his "Gourmet Dog Shit" ep of the Dogpatch podcast!

https://imgur.com/gallery/ZsH1UM2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpVpUb78YzA

excited for this! i like the single.

https://i.imgur.com/2CHgQA0.jpg

couldn't make it through more than 10 seconds of any track on new album. really unpleasant music.

whoa jesus that bad???! Like The Outsider bad? his last was fairly decent given its submission towards current trends rather than attempting to redefine his sound on top of it.

more unlistenable than Jesus is King?

lol Kanye + gospel could not be more repellant to me, haven't heard it
this sounds like a shitty mowax album from 2002 you'd find in discount bins 2 months after it was released. No idea what he was going for, it's all over the place. Either tuneless techno workouts or boring aimless triphop.

the 2nd half is with rappers huh. Not as bad as 1st but I just don't have the energy now to dig thru it for possible gems.

his songs with rappers are almost never good, at least post-Solesides

mo'wax went under in 2002 and only released a couple of things that year, but they stand out among the best in the mo'wax catalog

1. jordan fields' luminous deep house album "moments in dub"

2. parsley sound's elephant-six-alike s/t album

3. dj shadow's "the private press"

also released a couple of mostly forgettable but otherwise acceptable singles by skelf (howie b doing progressive breaks) and malcolm catto that year

but no aimless trip hop or tuneless techno in 2002

Lol wtf

just sayin

Mo wax didn't seem exactly right to me but I couldn't think of another label from around then plus shadow was involved with them and good god it's a simile I didn't expect the music nerd police

i didn't expect the music nerd police

on ILM?

ha. Private Press is great and heartfelt.

his songs with rappers are almost never good, at least post-Solesides

I liked the De La track that came out a few months ago, could have taken an EP of them teaming up

mo'wax went under in 2002 and only ...

I love this place sometimes.

this is a terrible album tho

ha i listened to that Parsley Sounds album 100 times. That's what Elephant 6 sounds like? I should check those guy out

i just got that mixed up in my head with "Cage the Elephant" who is someone i saw Beck was touring with

pay me no mind

I have that Parsley Sound album, need to listen to it again.

Picked up the new DJ Shadow because I’d been listening to ‘Endtroducing’ and ‘Private Press’ recently and...it’s not either of those.

Read an interview with him recently where he talks about having learned more studio skills recently, and I think there’s sometimes a relationship between “later career enthusiasm for learning technical aspects of craft” and “making duller music”.

Listening to Endtroducing recently I was thinking that part of what I love about the record is the way Shadow acts as a drum/percussion soloist on the MPC. Maybe that had been done before, but it was what made the record feel so fresh to me when I first heard it as a teenager and so different from other sample-based records that were mainly about loops. Also the oddly pleasing dissonances created by the samples brushing against one another, which I wonder if it was partly accidental. Like it's actually a harmonically and melodically interesting album too, and it's not just individual loops by jazz fusion dudes that make it so.

The beat on the Run The Jewels track is horrible, the De La Soul song is way better

I remember the first thing previewed off of Private Press was "Monosylabik" and he was talking about how it's based on a one second thing chopped a thousand different ways and it took months to do... and hearing it and just thinking.. ok good for you...... Thankfully there was plenty more going on with that album.

I loved that song and its expression of craft. That album is as good as Endtroducing to me - while not as "fresh" the songs felt far more polished and established the pinnacle of his sound, which he quickly and forever abandoned afterwards, almost as if to intentionally tell his audience to fuck off.

Only heard the first disc so far - pretty dull and even less original than the last one, which was marginally decent but a shadow *pun intended* of his first two. Ugh. RIP DJ Shadow.

yeah man alive, well put about how the interesting harmonic/melodic roughness

I put on the first 20 mins or so of the instrumental suite this morning and it's sort of a mess. The first track I thought was just bad. Second was sort of interesting but maybe didn't quite hit the mark it was going for. What was maybe either the third or fourth track (I was in the car and didn't notice) sounded like a really shitty jam session involving a real jazz drummer and a complete novice keyboard player (like when the guitar player who doesn't know keys jumps on the keys for fun during a break). I made it as far as Ju-ju-juju-juggernaut and I felt like I didn't get what he was even going for.

Listening to the instrumental side and it sounds like he's fully absorbed the influence of the beat scene (that was originally influenced by him, at least in part) and become a self-sufficient digital producer who doesn't need to sample records when he doesn't want to. Unfortunately it sounds like shitty future bass half the time.

He still has a pretty idiosyncratic approach to rhythm and I like that a lot of it is pretty wonky. But a lot of the sound design just sounds like presets or software demos, but with a weirder approach to rhythm & structure.

Got to the last few tracks and it's amazing how much more 'DJ Shadow' it sounds when he throws a breakbeat in there.

There are a few good songs on side 2 (Wiki, Pusha T, the fake Future Islands track), but it's so all over the place. Maybe it's just supposed to function as a "hey maybe hire DJ Shadow as a producer" resume.

i don't see anyone but the most ardent Shadow stans giving this much play at all

I tried but I won't be going back to this really.

The Outsider killed any interest I had in hearing his new material. Except for 3 Freaks which I think is the weirdest song I've ever heard played on commercial hip hop radio.

The Private Press showed that he had been expanding his listening in contemporary music beyond just backpacker hip hop/trip hop and the sources of those samples. That was an explosive time in music there, a lot of disparate factions mingling styles.

Everyone should be allowed a bad album. But yeah I can't really see listening to this a second time.

he seems genuinely restless and always searching which I think is bound to result in another good album at some point, but yeah on first pass this ain't it