Bay-area native Josh Davis (aka DJ Shadow) has a gigantic, almost mythical reputation to live up to on The Private Press, his first proper full-length record in six years. Shadow's 1996 debut, Endtroducing, was quite possibly the most groundbreaking and important album of the decade. It pried open the floodgates of electronic music, mesmerizing indie rock fans and hip hop heads alike with its revolutionary usage of breakbeats and found sound.
Before Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers made mainstream splashes in the United States, Shadow was lining the underground dance and hip hop scenes with his epochal mix tapes, planting the seeds of a genre primed to explode. Don't expect The Private Press to help change the face of modern music; after all, the guy's already accomplished the feat once, and has since lent his talents to the excellent U.N.K.L.E. and Handsome Boy Modeling School projects. Regardless, the record is another astonishing collage of crackling, genre-melting material, and it travels down some riveting trails that Endtroducing didn't touch.
Tracks like "...Meets His Maker" and "Walkie Talkie" are marvelously trashy snippets of instrumental hip hop, "Mashin' On The Motorway" is a hilarious, thumping road-rage anthem, and "You Can't Go Home Again" is a Shadow classic – a dramatic, grandiose, seven-minute jewel.
There are a few dull moments on Press (one being the inexplicably drab "Monosylabik"), and they alone make the record inferior to its flawless predecessor. But seeing that Endtroducing was arguably the Sgt. Pepper's for the electronica set, the comparison might be a useless exercise. It's not earth-shattering material, but The Private Press is still an engaging, rousing collection of top-notch electronic witchcraft – pretty much what we expected from the Lord of the Turntablists.
Appeared in the June 20, 2002, issue of Artvoice.