DJ Shadow Makes Blunt, Uncompelling Album

It sometimes seems like DJ Shadow is striving for mediocrity. DJ Shadow, legally known as Josh Davis, has come a long way since his popular debut LP, “Endtroducing......” Unfortunately, his trajectory has been a steady downward slope. Shadow’s newest album, “The Less You Know, the Better,” is somewhat lacking. The album was publicized as totally different from his previous work. “The Less You Know, the Better” purportedly received its name from a moment when Shadow was forced to watch CNN and Fox news while waiting in an airport, and was struck by the arbitrary nature of the information the media feeds us. Nonetheless, “The Better” is missing the originality and innovation that made Shadow’s first album a success in the ’90s that was enough to put his then label Mo’ Wax among the big names of innovative hip-hop labels. Instead, Shadow’s latest is an obnoxious album that delivers such a painfully clichéd message—albeit over decently sampled music—that it seems almost as offensive as the news programs that partially prompted it.

The first half of the album is perhaps best-suited to musical periphery—background music during a party, for instance. The smooth twang of funk guitar found on “Enemy Lines” is so unexpectedly soothing that its atmosphere is that of a druggy ’60s torch song. The problem is that by a certain point, the music becomes too repetitive to hold interest effectively. In the same respect, “Tedium” stays true to its title, and is so tedious that the song might be missed entirely when listening to the album as a whole; in fact, the prominent percussive sounds reminiscent of garbage cans and clanging kitchenware are so offensive as to invite disengagement.

Even the more pleasant aspects of whatever trance “Enemy Lines” and “Tedium” elicited is broken by “Give Me Back the Nights,” the lyrical poverty of which almost obscures the total lack of melodic merit. “Give me back the nights” is spoken over and over by a tense and increasingly aggressive narrator until he finally explodes into a screaming refrain of “the nights / The nights.” His shouts are supported by the computerized sounds of what sounds like the early theme music of the “Tron” arcade game, but even the music cannot distract from Shadow’s pervasive embarrassingly explicit angst or his blunt lyrics.

The one gem of the album, “Sad and Lonely,” is perhaps good enough to mitigate the disappointment accrued throughout the rest. The simplicity of the three-chord piano progression bathed in the sound of crackling vinyl, and paired with the soft ’60s pop female vocals crooning, “I’m sad and I’m lonely” is endearing and tender. The track is unlike any of the others in that it lacks male vocals, discernible drum-beats, and total emotional inaccessibility. However, Shadow’s decision to revisit “Sad and Lonely” in “(Not so) Sad and Lonely,” which is essentially the same track without vocals, is questionable at best.

If “Endtroducing.....” was the peak of DJ Shadow’s career, then “The Less You Know the Better” is a little more than halfway down the slope. Where his debut was about Davis finding himself as DJ Shadow and introducing his uniquely blended, sample-heavy music into the hip-hop industry, “The Less You Know, the Better” is Shadow’s semi-convincing, unoriginal struggle with media superficiality. With all the initial cleverness and spirit that drew listeners to him dissipated, little remains of interest here beyond a half-baked yet somehow overdone idea of resistance to mass media culture. Ironically, Shadow seems to have partially become a purveyor of what he so loathes.