The Less You Know, The Better
Blending electric guitars, beats, rock, and rap, DJ Shadow's new album finds him back in the mode of crowd-pleasing genre consumption à la UNKLE's Psyence Fiction. Problem is, the particular music he draws from here in no way plays to his strengths.
DJ Shadow’s albums have always functioned like stylistically far-flung mix-tapes pieced together with an internal logic that makes their cumulative effect outstrip their song-by-song merits. That fits Shadow’s cut-and-paste production methods, and it’s true even when—as on his first two albums, 1996’s Endtroducing and…
Not my words, but those of [a]DJ Shadow[/a]’s own painfully self-deprecating press release, on which the word “genius” has been scratched out by me and replaced with “wankery”.
Check out our album review of Artist's The Less You Know, The Better on Rolling Stone.com.
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On his fourth album in 15 years, DJ Shadow gets a little more conventional. By <strong>Dave Simpson</strong>
DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut Endtroducing became the new standard, an array of sound collages and sampling mastery orchestrated with a gift for song structure allowing the tracks to be more than just beats MCs haven’t rapped on yet.
DJ Shadow - The Less You Know, the Better review: The Less You Know, The Better sadly lives up to its name, where parts of the record border on the fantastic, but the rest just does its owner's name a great disservice