DJ Shadow: classic or dud?

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

That's optimistic considering what others pointed out that his interests are moving increasingly in the navel gazing technical production aspects.

What I meant by 'disparate styles' on The Private Press was mostly drum & bass and affiliated styles that were booming in the Bay Area around that time. You can hear also the echo of James Lavelle in that polished sheen over some of it, and I'd guess Lavelle was probably a guy vacuuming up influences from up and coming styles.

Still, Psyence Fiction has held up decently, but my favorite Shadow release is In Tune & On Time. The transition from Fixed Income/What Does Your Soul Look Like Pt 2. Great tour too.

the De La joint live on Kimmel with Babu & Melo-D from Beat Junkies, and a horn section:

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

man is gonna get checks from nobody speaks for decades, i swear it’s been used in dozens of ads and trailers

That album is as good as Endtroducing to me

I rank his first two albums roughly equally as well - Entroducing is superior in terms of depth and texture, but Private Press is much catchier and more playful.

This is obviously all my opinion but Endtroducing is one of those classic debuts where it’s obviously the result of years and years of honing a “long”term artistic vision and sorting wheat from chaff (there’s probably an actual term for this sort of thing). It just has a such a deep deep mood and it’s obvious that he went all in and threw down all his favorite magical samples... Private Press to me sounds like it was made by someone else who was really into Endtroducing but also maybe Moby’s Play and other electronica things.. with significantly less love for electric pianos. it’s like the old yarn about a band using up all its good songs on the debut... it’s not even remotely in the same wheelhouse to me, he fell to earth with a thud. endtroducing evokes a lot of heavy Bay Area atmosphere to me.. downtown SF at sunset, foggy mornings at the Ashby BART station flea market... Private Press doesn’t have a feel to me. Just my 8 million cents, sorry to go all turrican

I made similar point re: The Avalanches. Sample-based-collage producers blow their wad on 1st album and struggle thereafter.

imo shadow's real debut was "what does your soul look like"

i like entroducing and brimstead's post a lot tho

Yeah, brimstead otm. I should probably revisit The Private Press tho, I haven't heard it in 18 years.

I made similar point re: The Avalanches. Sample-based-collage producers blow their wad on 1st album and struggle thereafter

they only became sample-based collage producers on that album though, whereas Shadow's 1993-94 stuff is very much in the vein of Endtroducing - and the Avs had the problems of having albums that weren't in the vein of SILY rejected by Pav, and then the two who did the collage stuff becoming unable to work together, possibly related to various health issues of the one who didn't quit, which then further slowed down his process.

Shadow just seems to have wanted to make all his albums have a different sound, and to change his working methods

brimstead makes a very valid point for sample based music. when you think about it, dj shadow was probably destined to fall into that mode. he literally built his early eps and endtroducing on his favorite records. and everyone's list eventually ends, so it only figures that he started to just look for similar records to build similar sounds on with the private press. i still think private press is really good, but ultimately disappointing coming after endtroducing.