DJ Shadow, Endtroducing.....

I know. Obvious, right? For as many obscure (New Fast Automatic Daffodils, William Orbit) or credibility-threatening (Def Leppard, Def Leppard) entries as there might be on this list, there are some real no-brainers, too: The Soft Bulletin? Fucking Grace? Could I be any more predictable? But when an album�s great, it�s great, and eventually you just kind of have to throw up your hands in surrender and let it blow your fucking mind.

No surprise, then, that the �Sargeant Pepper�s of trip-hop� (yet another music-crit gem I wish I�d coined) should wind up here. DJ Shadow is an artist I discovered backwards, beginning when I got The Private Press when it was realeased two years ago. It was good, sure, but everyone said oh man, you gotta get the first one. A latecomer to the genre, I hadn�t even heard of Endtroducing..... until probably the turn of the century. So on a trip to San Francisco last year, after a visit to Amoeba Records that gave my bank account a hernia, and a stop to see Neil in Hayward�hometown of Shadow�s alter-ego Josh Davis�I was driving up the coast, through Sacramento, to wine country and beyond.

That�s when I had my first listen to Endtroducing....., and it worked beautifully. Which is strange, when you really think about it, because here I was cruising up sunny 101 listening to one of the most noirish, menacing albums in recent history. So then when I listened to it again, back in snowy Iowa, or last fall on afternoons darkened by cold thunderstorms, it worked even better. DJ Shadow knows exactly what it takes to make electronica truly epic, in a way that only a few other artists�Underworld, Orbital perhaps�understand. And so he built this album with massive, nine-minute fortresses like �Changeling� and �Stem / Long Stem� and �Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain� and adorned his kingdom with equally intricate motifs like the furious �Number Song� or the haunting �Midnight In A Perfect World�. And then there are the samples. This album is famously constructed entirely with samples, and there�s never been a better argument for the shamelessly exhuming one�s progenitors and pilfering their valuables. It�s a non-stop game of spot-the-source, and you�d have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure vinyl to get very far beyond the obvious Metallica, Bjork, and Nirvana snippets.

But I was more concerned with absorbing the music as a whole which was obviously much more than the sum of its parts, and I immersed myself in it last summer, going on long August runs accompanied by the locomotive funk of �Changeling� or getting a beer buzz in Ransom�s apartment and letting my head swim along with the bizarre, then dystopian, then eventually gorgeous tour de force �Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain�. This album outlived the majority of 90s electronica by turning its back on the blissed-out sunniness of stereotypical trip-hop music and, in doing so, became an instant dark-horse classic.

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