The Private Press : DJ Shadow : Review : Rolling Stone

Line up for "Attack of the Clones" if you want -- for a totally different breed of science-fiction geek, the long-awaited follow-up of the summer belongs to DJ Shadow. Shadow, otherwise known as California beatmaster and vinyl fetishist Josh Davis, became one of the leading lights of DJ culture with a string of head-spinning singles in the Nineties, weaving more obscure rare-groove samples than any lawyer could trace into an expansive new style of headphone funk. He defined the tripping, hopping Mo' Wax sound, so much so that by the time he got around to releasing his debut album, Endtroducing. . .DJ Shadow, in 1996, it already sounded not just familiar but inevitable. A classic the day it was released, Endtroducing . . . still holds up, especially in the cinematic crawl of tracks such as "Midnight in a Perfect World" and "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt." All slow-motion tension and release, Shadow's grooves evoked a late night in the heart of the city, with your body poised right on the edge of utter fatigue.

A hard act to follow, and so maybe it's no wonder that DJ Shadow has taken six years to produce the follow-up. The Private Press is a moody, murky album, by definition not as groundbreaking or epochal as Endtroducing . . . but fascinating enough in its own right. Even though The Private Press is Shadow's first official solo album since 1996, he hasn't exactly been PlayStationing the years away. In 1998, he masterminded the ill-fated U.N.K.L.E. project Psyence Fiction, a botched attempt at an all-star supergroup with guest vocalists including Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the Beastie Boys' Mike D. He also scored the film Dark Days and made some of his most entertaining music ever with DJ-producer Cut Chemist, especially last year's Product Placement, which kicked off with a sample from Oscar the Grouch.

So after all these years, The Private Press is neither a sequel nor a continuation. As the title implies, there's nothing remotely pop about it, either. Shadow programs a fifty-seven-minute pastiche of beats, sound effects, machine hums, found voices and mock-symphonic patterns of robot noise, shifting from texture to texture almost casually. The first thing you hear is a scratchy home recording from 1951, as a bleary-sounding female announcer declares, "Tonight, we got together, kept the kids up and decided to have a little fun making this record." It's an apt introduction to The Private Press, an album full of playful experiments.

As on Endtroducing . . . , the best tracks are the ones that take their time digging into a groove, letting the momentum build. "Fixed Income" and ". . . Meets His Maker" set the tone with loping bass and spaghetti-western guitars. "Monosylabik" slices up a distorted reggae beat with industrial-level feedback blurts. Since Radiohead freely admit how much they've been influenced by DJ Shadow, it's only right that "Giving Up the Ghost" should sound like primo Radiohead, with nerve-rattling string-plucking and a lonesome violin howling. The fantastic seven-minute "You Can't Go Home Again" sounds like New Order playing ska, a complex percussive groove against rockafeller-skank guitar and a backdrop of strings nicked from a movie that's just out of reach of your memory. "GDMFSOB" mixes it up with samples ranging from "Disco Duck" to Mr. Spock.

The announcer from the introduction also declares, "There's so many things I could say, but I just can't get them together." There's definitely too much of that going on in The Private Press -- it's weird how an instrumental-minded guy like Shadow gets tripped up by his corny taste in human voices. "Walkie Talkie" and "Right Thing" are ruined by faux rapping, the attempted soul ballad "Six Days" is just painful, and the most beautiful track here, the nine-minute "Blood on the Motorway," goes bad halfway through when a gospel voice comes in to emote. ("You have not betrayed your ideals/Your ideals betrayed you" -- okaaay!) On the weak vocal tracks, Shadow sounds too heavily influenced by Moby's Play, ironically one of the many albums heavily influenced by Endtroducing . . . . The one vocal that works is "Mashin' on the Motorway," a funny showcase for underground rapper Lateef. But a few failures are the price DJ Shadow pays for experimenting, and even the excesses on The Private Press are worth a spin or two, if only for their welcome humane touch, their love of bric-a-brac and sound for its own sake. In a time when the music world is going through a real-life attack of the clones, DJ Shadow remains a valuable phantom menace.