Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 19/09/06
Label: Island

It's tough being a visionary - sometimes your vision gets stolen from you. Certainly, that seems to have been the problem that has plagued Josh "DJ Shadow" Davis since his groundbreaking debut album, "Endtroducing", was released a decade ago. That record invented a genre - trip-hop - pretty much on its own, and in the case of a track called "Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96", it hitched Shadow's colours to an agenda he never pursued. After the much better - but comparatively poorly received - follow-up, "The Private Press", a rethink was clearly necessary. What better time to disabuse those with their own notions of what he makes and why?

"The Outsider", then, is not really Shadow's third album: in some respects, it's his debut. It has arrived after its maker has been put through the ringer - a near-fatal car crash in London followed the desperate saga of his wife's monoamniotic pregnancy, during which time the couple were told that, if one of their twins was not aborted, both children and mother could die. Deciding to trust friends made in online support networks, the Davises ignored medical advice: mother and both daughters are doing fine.

So it is little surprise "The Outsider" bristles at the thought that anyone other than Shadow should determine its sound or attitude. The opening track, "This Time (I'm Gonna Do It My Way)", exemplifies the agenda (to his eternal credit, Shadow has set up an escrow account to collect royalties for the still unidentified vocalist whose a cappella tape the DJ unearthed from a bankruptcy sale). This is determinedly individual music, made first and foremost for its creator, f*ck you very much.

Contrary to the way he's been perceived, Shadow has never been anything other than passionate about hip hop, and "The Outsider" is his love letter to the genre, revelling in all its myriad excesses. Hyphy, the Bay Area equivalent of crunk, has arrived in his life at precisely the right moment, and he invites guests from the scene to slather bullet-headed raps all over tracks like "Turf Dancing" and the blistering "3 Freaks". It is the freshest hip hop sound to have emerged in years, and Shadow proves himself one of its finest practitioners.

In between all the gettin' dumb, David Banner guests on stand-out "Seein' Thangs", a broiling post-Katrina tongue-lashing, before an instrumental outtake from Shadow's work on an abandoned Zack de la Rocha album, "Artifact (Instrumental)", proves he can do punk rock, too. At the end, E-40, the nine-album veteran left coast rap institution who has reinvented himself as hyphy's biggest star, guests on "Dat's My Part", paying homage to "the legendary DJ Shadow", marvelling at the track's "humungous throb". It seems the only sane response to what precedes it - a record of ferocious single-mindedness and wholly commendable self-assurance.

    by Angus Batey