DJ Shadow's spent years making it clear he's got no interest in making Endtroducing Pt 2, but this is as close as he's ever gotten to capturing that original magic.
Nobody Speak's a red herring, and an unfortunate distraction. It's a fine song, but its got no place on this album, shades of The Outsider. It's like DJ Shadow needed buzz, realized a that doing a track with the hottest crossover rappers going was the ticket, and stuck it into slot 2 to get it out of the way. A couple other tracks stick out (The Sideshow, Mambo), but --
those out of the way
Dammit if there's not shades of the old magic. It's punched up with glitchy modern IDMism, and there's none of those brilliant, meandering minutes-long samples that stretched the Endtroducing soundscape into narrative nowhere, but for moments, for actual long stretches near the end...
DJ Shadow's at his best when he lives up to his name, when he disappears except as shade and shape, lets something pour out that sounds tapped from a glorious spacetime helix of human music and experience. When he just dangles a vocal sample lets you spin your own webs from it.
The showy The Outsider was the opposite, the underrated TMYKTB and Private Press glimpsed it, and here it's cracking open again. Especially on Three Ralphs into Bergschrund, and the entire last 5 track suite, you can really get lost in that seamless mix of dexterous details and large-scale sweeps, something grand and large with intricate stitching.
That magic's vulnerable to flashes and curtain drops, and there's too many hiccups for the spell to last, but in between those distracting signposts there's thrilling glimpses into some woolly impossible land 4/5
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