CD Reviews

DJ Shadow | The Less You Know, The Better

Verve (2011)

By DAN WEISS | October 5, 2011

3.0 Stars

Bias alert: 1996's Endtroducing . . . DJ Shadow is one of the most firmly enduring perpetual motion machines in all of musical history, defying genre ("What was trip-hop, dad?") and all preconceived notions regarding an hour filled with turntablism, spoken word, and Metallica samples. The beautiful and deeply-textured "world's first entirely sampled album" (we won't tell Guinness about Lyrics Born's "It's the money" cameo) was instantly both dated and timeless. Six years later, The Private Press was as excellent as an arena-rock version could be, but four years wasn't a long-enough incubation for The Outsider, which made hyphy unfun. So the big question with The Less You Know . . is if five years is long enough to create a Shadow album. The answer is: maybe. Shadow's densest and longest work at first sounds like an overstylized, underwritten retread with lots of superfluous cuts sporting names like "Tedium." But it eventually rewards hard listening: the audacious opening one-two of "Back to Front" and "Border Crossing," the Little Dragon-assisted "Scale It Back," and the maddeningly buried comedy of "Circular Logic" and "Give Me Back the Nights." Worth parsing, just not sure how much.

Sepalcure | Sepalcure
Taste-making electronic music Web site Resident Advisor recently declared 2011 as Sepalcure's year, citing early buzz from this release, their debut LP, and solo releases by members Travis Stewart (a/k/a Machinedrum) and Praveen Sharma (a/k/a Braille).
Pinch & Shackleton | Pinch & Shackleton
Honest Jon's Records is nearing deity status within the pantheon of electronic music labels.
Trans Am | What Day Is It Tonight? Trans Am Live, 1993 - 2008
Trans Am are distillers of guilty pleasures, mixing fat AOR riffs with sleazy electronic accents and a propulsive attitude typically reserved for arcade soundtracks. What Day Is It Tonight? covers the DC-area band’s 20-year history with high-quality, high-energy live cuts taken from their many tours.
Various Artists | Where the Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965 - 1968
More than three years in the making, the most recent installment of Rhino's legendary archival garage-rock series offers an amazingly comprehensive excavation of an absurdly fertile scene.
Various Artists | Nippon Girls: Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1966–1970
Girl-group records are great and everything, yet the countless compilations out there were becoming a little hit-or-miss until 2005, when the great Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found box set finally gave this diverse genre a proper taxonomy.
Various Artists | Casual Victim Pile: Austin 2010
The notion that regional musical flavors exist independently in American cities is quickly becoming an archaic truism, seeing as how the world really is a stage these days, at least in the digital sense.
Bearstronaut | Broken Handclaps
There's a distinct absence of wildlife or astronauts on Lowell electronica quartet Bearstronaut's latest release.
Avi Buffalo | Avi Buffalo
Look, I get it: the last thing we need right now is yet another band who can be described as “sun-baked,” “reverb-soaked,” or even just “psychedelic.” But Avi Buffalo (I know! An animal name to boot!) are worth your attention for a few reasons.
Goose Bumps 4.0 is an aural smorgasbord
Milled Pavement Records' Goose Bumps series of hip-hop/electronic music compilations comes to an end with a bang: The fourth and final installment has 66 tracks featuring 96 different artists over the course of four albums.
Review: Brandon Flowers | Flamingo
Brandon Flowers has gone on record saying he brought the songs on Flamingo to his fellow bandmates for the next Killers album and was given the brush-off.
Review: Kevin Dunn | No Great Lost: Songs 1979–1985
Casa Nueva Industries (2010)
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