DJ Shadow: Preemptive Strike : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

DJ Shadow, aka Josh Davis, has called his music a hommage to a mostly forgotten minute of history: pre-rap hip-hop, instrumental collage music with hard beats and an emphasis on wrenching transitions. And now we have his own forgotten history, stuff released before his popular Endtroducing album of 1996. Preemptive Strike is a farrago of odds and ends dating back to 1993, most of them released as limited-run singles on the English label Mo Wax. You can almost smell the vinyl-store mildew on the best of these, like "High Noon" – with crackles and superimposed snippets from antiquated funk, rock and soundtrack obscurities, Shadow's music is sonically cross-referenced for maximum cognitive dissonance.

Most notably for new fans, the CD includes the complete "What Does Your Soul Look Like," a melancholy four-part work from '95 with a unity of languid mood and sampled spacey female vocals. It's no masterpiece: Each section, built on one riff and one beat, palls before the end (and we've already heard two parts of it, with subtle differences, on Endtroducing). Preemptive Strike also includes a 22-minute scratch-aria over a Shadow track by the fleet-fingered turntablist Q-Bert – skillful, gimmicky and beside the point. For curious latecoming trip-hoppers only.