Reviews
June: 18 albums you need to hear this month
You've got a lot of listening to do
DJ Shadow 'The Mountain Will Fall' (Mass Appeal)
Genius clearly isn’t enough sometimes. This album shows that DJ Shadow’s superhuman abilities – in reassembling sounds, samples, textures and melodies into something greater than the sum of their parts – have clearly been undiminished by time. There are ebbing and flowing synths that pluck at the heartstrings, single drum hits that alone can make your synapses tingle and gorgeous hooks and atmospheres agogo. But Shadow clearly wants more: he then tweaks everything here to within an inch of its life, either with quasi-Squarepusher micro-edits, manic trap and crunk drum patterns or over-the-top production bordering on EDM. There are a few tracks (including the two straight-ahead rap tunes and haunting closer ‘Suicide Pact’) where he does actually let the groove unfold naturally, but that just makes even more frustratingly clear how much better the rest of this record could be if only Shadow would just ease off on the tinkering and fidgeting. Sometimes, it seems, more is actually less.
5/10
