Shadow Conspiracy

Shadow (Josh Davis to his mother) spent the next few years laying relatively low -- an appropriate tack for an artist for whom mystique and anonymity are trademarks, but an irritation to electronica fans habituated to expecting their heroes to churn out new product by next Wednesday. After a slapdash collection of B-sides, Davis threw a few curveballs on his next project, UNKLE's Psyence Fiction, a collaboration with Mo Wax label founder James Lavelle that sagged under the weight of some pretentious guest spots by the likes of Thom Yorke and Richard Ashcroft, though Davis gave Endtroducing holdouts a taste of the old Shadow on a few key instrumentals.

Far more satisfying to the in-crowd were his two mix records with Cut Chemist, Brain Freeze and Product Placement. And why not -- the myriad copyright infringements on both CDs made the projects cool enough. But since releasing the CDs commercially would have been a legal nightmare, they only could be sold quietly at underground record stores in Davis' adopted hometown of San Francisco, and sometimes by the duo themselves at gigs. Because the bootleg status of both records made them impossible to find for casual fans who may have accidentally bought Endtroducing after reading a blurb about it in Rolling Stone, they undeniably occupied a hip cache. Still, both records seemed like two more ways for a genius to avoid following up a masterpiece.

Now of course, that follow up is here, and nearly every segment of Shadow's clique has issued a collective yawn, from the downloaders on Audiogalaxy who burned their own versions of The Private Press months before its release date, to formerly smitten critics who now seem to think reaching into those same bag of tricks for a second time spells musical failure. Some charge the record unimaginatively stakes the same sonic territory as Endtroducing; while others take offense at the supposedly slicker production values, a utterly ridiculous claim that doesn't explain why "You Can't Go Home Again," the single released a month prior to the actual album, didn't crack the Top 40.

Still others bring the thunder with the ultimately damning accusation that the new record sounds too much like the only other electronica maestros to gain mainstream crossover support since Davis became a critic's darling: Moby and Fatboy Slim. If that accusation is true -- and it isn't -- it only shows how much both the former Richard Hall and Norman Cook owe Davis for teaching them their shit. Granted, Moby had been making records for years, but by the time of Endtroducing's release, even in the opinion of many of his acolytes, he had hit a creative dead end. Two years later, his 1999 landmark Play reversed his downward trajectory, both critically and financially, and he had Endtroducing's innovations to thank. Previously, Moby would throw in a sampled vocal phrase wherever he deemed it suitable, but on Play, he adopted Shadow's technique of not merely sampling a vocal line, but also recontextualizing it both musically and conceptually. By the same token, Shadow's celebrated method of cobbling together dozens of musical pieces for one track certainly gave careers to scenesters like kindred spirit Fatboy Slim, another keyboard nut unafraid of showing off the eclectic titles in his gargantuan record collection.

Still, although the naysayers are right that Davis has streamlined Endtroducing's original approach for this long-awaited sequel, drawing a more direct line between A and B rather than taking the scenic route, there's no way this record could ever have had Moby or Fatboy Slim's name on it. Moby, who himself has also been inundated from critics with "less of the same" approbations for his new record 18, has never quite exhibited Shadow's unique facility with rhythm, or painstaking approach to sample layering. Fatboy Slim, meanwhile, either could care less for the kinds of pretensions that make Shadow's work so compelling, or simply doesn't operate on that level.

Either way, nearly every single quibble about The Private Press' alleged compromises will be meaningless one hundred years from now, when it will sound just as fresh as Endtroducing, if not as epochal. No one can blame the earlier album for coming first, and no one can blame Davis for wanting to abandon the otherworldliness of his debut to embrace the more direct approach he negotiates here. But those who can't hear the richness of this record are kidding themselves. "Six Days," which samples Colonel Bagshot's obscure "Six Day War" and which might as well be the six years Davis spent relatively out of the limelight, could be a personal apocalypse as well as a political one. Even a track like "Walkie Talkie," which stitches together at least three vocal samples into a bracingly immediate statement of purpose ("I'm a BAD . . . motherfucking DJ . . . this is why I walk and talk this way!"), carries philosophical weight in Davis' aural universe, mainly because the rhythms that his voices inhabit aren't merely cerebral, but life-affirming as well.

Critics have been protesting for years that the sampling trend has given way to an army of lazy hacks ready to prime the pump of obvious '70s rock and soul nuggets. Davis continues to turn that notion on its head -- who would have thought so many garage sale and pawn shop obscurities could be molded into music much more compelling than their original source material? Somehow, his achievements in this arena continually get underplayed in reviews of The Private Press. From the hypnotic keyboard line that wobbles through "Fixed Income," to the dizzying turntable maneuvers of the French lesson "Un Autre Introduction," Davis accumulates more sonic details in the context of one song than most pretenders can conjure over the course of an album.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in this album's climax, "You Can't Go Home Again," the astonishing single that, inexplicably, sounded overproduced to most cognoscenti. Beginning with the opening phrase of the South American folk song "El Condor Pasa," the song then launches into a fast-paced, tumbling drum loop that serves as a waiting room into which various samples walk in and out, stepping over each other as they go. "El Condor Pasa" comes and goes as well -- except it doesn't share the same time signature as the main song, so it takes on a completely different shape each times it cues up, juxtaposed against a different beat in the loop, contrasted against another note in a breathtaking, never-ending cascade of hijacked melodies.

One can understand why the panel of experts is serving up Paul Oakenfold's head on a plate these days, but if Josh Davis has fallen from any standard, it's only from the monumentally high one he set with Endtroducing. Surely, to fall short of that standard only slightly constitutes no crime. When Sasha and Digweed come up out of the basement to produce something like The Private Press, perhaps the criterion for judging albums like these will change. Until then, Davis will be untouchable, even as he sits on top of the bar he raised, content to make music from a height very few musicians, or pop music critics, will ever reach.

Chicago, IL
July 2002