Endtroducing . . .

DJ SHADOW

Endtroducing . . . (Mo’ Wax)

“THE JIMI Hendrix or Jimmy Page of the sampler,” states the accompanying sticker on the back of the album sleeve. Thankfully, there are no trip-hop versions of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ or ‘Whole Lotta Love’ contained on the 64 minutes of Endtroducing . . ., DJ Shadow’s debut album. What we have instead is some of the most astonishing music you will hear this or any other year, sharing CD space with the most irritatingly self-indulgent bollocks to appear since Scott Walker decided the time was right for a follow-up to Climate Of Hunter.

In many ways, Endtroducing . . . is a frustrating album. Approximately a third of it can only be described as full-blown wank, the sound of a man with too much studio time on his hands. Happily, the remaining 66% is pure, undiluted, sit-on-my-face genius. Had the 23-year-old spent a little longer judiciously chopping and fine-tuning, we might very well be looking at trip-hop’s first (and possibly only) masterpiece.

Anyway, there’s enough cracking stuff here to raise the album to the status of “generally fantastic”, without quite managing “cast-iron classic”. Take, for instance, the ghostly, majestic piano intermezzo of ‘Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt’. Every bit as grandiose as its title suggests, it inches slowly along at its own pace, the piano underpinned by suitably cavernous drums which were probably half-inched from some obscure Jan & Dean b-side and whipped into shape by Shadow’s sequencer.

‘Stem/Long Stem’ and ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’ are pretty stunning, too – the latter, in particular, resembles nothing so much as an aural rainstorm – while the disconcertingly beautiful ‘Changeling’ consists of three synth-chords, one after the other, with the omnipresent thunderous drums driving the song along mercilessly. ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like?’, which first saw the light of day as a 40-minute single, is present here in edited form, part four located in the middle of the album, part one at the end. That’s the way this guy works.

And it’s also what makes Endtroducing . . . so frustrating. You get the feeling that had he worked at it just a little longer, Shadow could have made the unchallenged album of ‘96. Instead, many of the tracks rely too much on a noisy percussive assault, with the drums battering the listener’s ears senseless, adding to the sense of repetition.

Also, a couple of the tracks here are just excruciatingly drawn-out and musically impoverished – I defy anyone to sit through ‘The Number Song’ and ‘Mutual Slump’ without fidgeting and losing interest midway through. As for the spoken-word passage on the aforesaid ‘Building Steam . . .’ (featuring Shadow yapping inanely about how talented and gifted he is), it’s almost enough to make you hope that Endtroducing . . . bombs completely, just to make him shut the fuck up.

Not that it will. The music press weeklies across the water have greeted it in terms that I’d hoped they were saving for the second coming of our Lord, the consensus being that it’s this year’s Timeless, that it is to 1996 what Maxinquaye was to last year, et cetera, et cetera. Not quite; just the majority of it.

Jonathan O’Brien