Track Listing

1. Best Foot Forward
2. Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt
3. The Number Song
4. Changeling
5. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)
6. Untitled
7. Stem/Long Stem
8. Mutual Slump
9. Organ Donor
10. Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96
11. Midnight In A Perfect World
12. Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain
13. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1-Blue Sky Revisit)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3941 in Music
• Released on: 1996-11-19
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
DJ Shadow, a.k.a. Josh Davis, could be credited with bringing newfound introspection to the gloating sounds of hip-hop. Condensed with urban oscillations and scatological beats, Endtroducing shutters with eclectic samples and aural montages that reach beyond the constraints of hip-hop style. Enhancing the mix with fundamentals of rock, soul, funk, ambient, and jazz, the modern fusions fail to go unnoticed, even by the casual listener. While most of the tracks are compiled by layering samples from vinyl treasures found in used-record bins, the production quality of the mosaic is unmatched. Darkened melodies carry throughout the album with its eye on the end of the tunnel. The narration samples come from numerous sources and keep the listener involved and waiting for resolution. With a message as fragmentary as an overheard conversation, Endtroducing conveys no apparent conclusion, but begs the mind, body, and soul for some rewind. --Lucas Hilbert

Album Description
DJ Shadow, a.k.a. Josh Davis, could be credited with bringing newfound introspection to the gloating sounds of hip-hop. Condensed with urban oscillations and scatological beats, Endtroducing shutters with eclectic samples and aural montages that reach beyond the constraints of hip-hop style. Enhancing the mix with fundamentals of rock, soul, funk, ambient, and jazz, the modern fusions fail to go unnoticed, even by the casual listener. While most of the tracks are compiled by layering samples from vinyl treasures found in used-record bins, the production quality of the mosaic is unmatched. Darkened melodies carry throughout the album with its eye on the end of the tunnel. The narration samples come from numerous sources and keep the listener involved and waiting for resolution. With a message as fragmentary as an overheard conversation, Endtroducing conveys no apparent conclusion, but begs the mind, body, and soul for some rewind. Universal. 2004.

Customer Reviews

Groundbreaking
When Endtroducing came out, there was little if anything like it anywhere. It's hard to recapture that same feeling more than 10 years after the fact, but in my mind, this remains one of the top 50 innovative albums in music. Simply incredible turntablism.

Welcome to the Best Album of All-Time
I can sit here and write the best comments of this album. If you're here, you know why. No explanation needed. There has yet to be an album to dethrone Endtroducing as the best album I've ever heard. Some have challenged but to no avail. No one album has captured the essence of music quite like this album did for me during the spring of 1997.

This is the top of the mountain. Any other review I make will be a step down. There's a saying that you can only go south from the north pole. As is the case with this album.

Best album since 1997 and continues to be so today. Incredible.

Light + Dark = Shadow
Listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first musical album ever to be created entirely from sampled sources, DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing..." took a genre that had been pioneered by Massive Attack and proved just exactly what it was capable of. Even critics of this record have to admit that, like it or not, this album changed the collective face of electro-cloned hip hop.

Using samples from sources as diverse as The Beastie Boys, Metallica, A Tribe Called Quest, Tangerine Dream, Nirvana, Bjork, Tears for Fears, and even Twin Peaks, DJ Shadow (Josh Davis) creates a world of drum-driven dreaminess. Something instantly familiar without being recognizable. A new class of listening pleasure that is akin to having a persistent itch being continuously scratched.

His record is heavy on the breaks, his phenomenal mixing abilities shining through the most at this moments. The Transylvanian "Organ Donor" and the funky free-for-all that is "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt" are schizophrenic proof of this, and they're also great examples of how Shadow likes to take his energy at the tables and condense it into something that could be equally classified as "creepy" and "transcendent."

The mood, like the DJ's name, is dark, but it also implies something brighter. You can't have shadows without light, and many of "Endtroducing..."s songs glimmer with the outlines of something crystalline and playful. All three of the "Transmission" tracks ("Changeling," "Stem/Long Stem," and "What Does Your Soul Look Like [Part 1: Blue Sky Revisit]") are infused with such a loping lounge-y lilt that it's hard not to smile as you listen, even with Shadow shadows it all with his dark, trademark rhythms.

The title of my favorite song on the whole album sums Shadow's mood perfectly: "Midnight in a Perfect World." The record is about perfection, it's about ensuring that each molecule and vibration is set to the same beautiful frequency. And then that aching beauty is saturated with the flavors of night, salted with stars, and basted in the ambient majesty of Shadow's lunar lunacy. "Endtroducing..." is a night owl of a record, a musical journey that is always on the verge of dawn.

Welcome to the shadows.