DJ Shadow, The Private Press (MCA) 9+
There are two ways to listen to The Private Press. One can listen to it as the follow-up to DJ Shadow, aka Josh Davis' genre-defining 1996 album Endtroducing, or simply as an album on its own terms. Endtroducing revolutionized the art of sampling by assembling a collage into a seamless, cohesive whole that packed as much emotional whallop as any classically conceived music. In that sense, The Private Press takes a half-step back, a stylistic hodgepodge that could have pre-dated Endtroducing. Ironically, the biggest points of departure are the vocal samples on cuts like "Six Days," which is indebted to Moby's Play, and "Walkie Talkie," which cleverly splices up the vocals, something that's been done more impressively by Prefuse 73. The shift from melancholy to wacky is somewhat jarring on "Mashin' On The Motorway," a cartoonish road-rage skit by Lateef. Shadow purists who expected the new set to be scratches from the mountain, laying out music's future path may be bitterly disappointed. But it's hard not to like these tracks once the pesky expectations wither away. "Right Thing/GDMFSOB" showboats Shadow's wild side, with a head-spinning array of dance-based samples that even gives a wink to an early Daft Punk sample. And there are certainly plenty of woozy, downbeat epics, from the eerie "Giving Up The Ghost," which would fit comfortably on Radiohead's Kid A, to the concisely haunting "…Meets His Maker," and the nine minute centerpiece "Blood On The Highway," built around hypnotic piano. "You Can't Go Home Again" is even more impressive, taking 80s electro beats, rubberizing and dubbifying them so that even when the cheesy synths come in, it evokes nostalgia without actually sounding retro. The Private Press begins and ends with samples from a 1951 homemade record. It's an interesting concept, one that Shadow didn't really do much with. Though he doesn't make any great leaps, he does remind us that recycled sounds can still express the primordial mess of the human soul.
