DJ, Savior But!
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Artist:
So if The Private Press had come out before Endtroducing....., would people think better of it? Or if it had come out less than two years after the debut, do you think DJ Shadow might have fortified his rep and rate higher today? Beats me, but I suspect he (and Press)'d get a little more respect. His latest CD, The Outsider, sadly won't help his cause. It's not necessarily because of Shadow - that he just doesn't exercise an acceptable level of creativity or that his sound is "played out" or something silly like that. There's just too many vocal presences - live (and sometimes tiresome) vocal presences - distracting from the deep background Shadow may or may not be trying to cultivate. I've tried listening many times, only to give up and wish Nump, the Federation, and Phonte Coleman hadn't made the guest list. And hello! I've never been a big Tribe Called Quest fan, but Q-Tip is capable of better. While his track partner, Lateef is threading "arteries," "Martinique," and "gardening" into a call to party (all in less than five seconds), Q's just sitting back, going yaaaawwn! Sadness.Anyway, winding up the report card, only one of the four instrumental / spoken word pieces I associate with Shadow rises above generic (for him) - "Artifact" with its clobbering bpm. Which leaves a lot of uninspiring rapping and scarier quasi-alt tracks that sound like they were written for elf quests. The one nice exception: "You Made It," where Shadow places a sprightly acoustic guitar line over a sunny bed of strings, gambles on Chris James' generic alt-emoting, and bestows a modest workable groove underneath. And waddayaknow? Belle & Sebastian is now a cool person!
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