Album Review: DJ Shadow - The Mountain

"Repeat Endtroducing over and over again?… I think it's time for certain fans to decide if they are fans of the album, or the artist." It's now ten years since DJ Shadow defended himself from the savaging meted upon third album The Outsider — 20 since the genre defining Endtroducing — and yet Josh Davis understandably just wants to push forward from the insanely complex mixology that comprised his early signature works.

His fifth (studio) album opens with the title track based around a sample of Dario Baldan Bembo's 1975 orchestral piece Prima Alba, taking the long cooled embers of dubstep and coking it into a striking sci-fi lullaby. The unsettlingly dark pace rarely lets up, from Run The Jewels' warning "Nobody speak/Nobody gets choked" (in a perfectly executed guest spot) to Ghost Town's intense paranoia and a woozy instrumental called Suicide Pact. When California builds up and takes a Squarepusher-y drill 'n' bass diversion in the last quarter, all hopes for an uplifting sweet spot like Six Days or This Time (I'm Gonna Try It My Way) go completely out the window.

Just one track will silence the baying of the Endtroducing devoted: The Sideshow's nostalgic scratches, beats and scrappy rhymes (courtesy Ernie Fresh) feels convincingly 1996. The Mountain Will Fall only occasionally fails to find a firm foothold, but at the end of the day, it's unfair to expect any artist to still be exactly where they were 20 years ago.