DJ Shadow plays Dublin on Monday 5th July 2010 in the Tripod. We’ve got tickets and a quick rundown of his career to date for those of you who may have been living on the moon the last 10 years.

UPDATE: WINNER!

Congratulations to ‘Ams’ who has won the two tickets for the DJ Shadow show in Dublin on Monday 5th July 2010.  Ams won our heart with her tales of the windy city and it’s deviant inhabitants being soundtracked by Shadow’s second album.  The fact that we were also bumping the Private Press in that very city in 2002 made us smile.  Thanks to everyone else for their insights into their favourite DJ Shadow album.

Proclaiming greatness in HipHop is part and parcel of the artform. Considering Shadow is a man of few words he makes a pretty bold statement on the opening of Entroducing using a quick snippet of the Masters of Ceremony’s ‘Dynamite’ (here). Few could argue with the first of a million samples Shadow drops at the beginning of his mid-nineties long-playing masterpiece. It’s very apt that the man of few words used a record to proclaim he’s your favorite DJ saviour.

Shadow hasn’t played a solo show in Dublin since 2001. He’s been around alongside CutChemist a couple of times but they’ve been strictly vinyl affairs and more of an indulgence for the funk-and-soul-oriented Shadow fans than the visual and auditory spectacle the punters usually get treated to at a DJ Shadow show. That said, it’s been 4 years since his last album (‘The Outsider‘) was released and 4 years since the critical beatdown he received for that album from various fan and press contingents.

Whether you didn’t understand it or just didn’t like it you have to admit nobody was expecting a repeat of anything that had come previously. This is Shadow’s strength (and possibly his biggest commercial weakness) but it’s apparent DJ Shadow gets reinvigorated for every new record going in a new artistic direction whether you like it or not. And that, more than anything, is hiphop. Below is a quick overview of the full length albums Shadow has released over the years along with the chance of winning tickets to his Dublin show in July.

WIN TICKETS TO THE DUBLIN SHOW 05.07.2010

POD Concerts have kindly given us a pair of tickets for the Shadow gig taking place in the Tripod, Harcourt Street, Dublin 2 on Monday 5th July 2010. All you need to do to enter is let us know what DJ Shadow album is your favourite and why in the comments section below. Feel free to be as brief or as convuluted as you like. We’ll pick the best answer based on a complex set of criteria that we’re still ironing out. That or whichever makes us laugh.

Entroducing (MoWax 1995)

Shadow’s most revered album and his first foray into producing an album all on his own. Shadow had released material prior to this record on Hollywood Basic (helmed by the late, great Dave Funkenklein <– read up on this guy) but this record was truly a coming of age. Cited by every ‘Top 100 albums’ lists and genuinely accepted as a pivotal milestone for so-called ‘sample-based’ music Entroducing still rocks now as it did in 1995. In fact, Shadow has never really revisited this format – instead building on the foundations laid down on this album but you can hear his sound on this record more so than his later releases.

Preemptive Strike (MoWax 1998)

Preemptive Strike is a retrospective compilation album of DJ Shadow’s singles released on the UK-based Mo’Wax label between 1991-1998. When Preemptive Strike was first released, it included a bonus track on a second disk which It featured DJ Q-Bert in a megamix entitled, “Camel Bobsled Race (DJ Shadow Megamix)”. This album (or compilation really) represents much of DJ Shadow’s material written pre-major label signing. The results are varied but consistent and if you heard this album after becoming familiar with Endtroducing you would find it a worthy companion rather than a retrospective. The collection is kept together primarily by its propensity for Shadow’s inate ability to flip all kinds of odd samples (Organ Donor says it all really). Shadow moves through every genre on this one, from slow-paced funk to hard and fast dance music. The centerpiece of the set is a four-part composition called “What Does Your Soul Look Like” which is constructed incredibly well and leaves you wondering just how Shadow puts these samples together on just an MPC60 and an ADAT. It’s a brilliant piece of work and the hardcore fans put this one above anything on Entroducing.

Private Press (MCA 2002)

Although not as critically well-received as his 1996 debut breakthrough Endtroducing…, The Private Press still received universal acclaim when it was released in 2006. Personally, it’s my favourite DJ Shadow album – the perfect balance between intelligent and thoughtful sampling and an informed musical ability. There’s an interesting aural allusion to the 80s throughout this record especially on tracks like “You Can’t Go Home Again” and “Monosylabik”. Will Monroe over at junkmedia.org put it best when describing this record: “Every detail of [The Private Press] is placed to further the narrative, and the tracks flow well together in the style of a classic rock LP. DJ Shadow can’t create a brand new sound with every release. With The Private Press, however, he’s shown he can continue to fuse his varied influences to explore the many uncharted territories of hip-hop.”

In Tune and On Time (Universal 2004)

Live! In Tune and on Time is Shadow’s first live album recorded in London at the Brixton Academy. The album features tracks and samples from his past albums as well as tracks and samples from his work with UNKLE and Quannum. It was released as a CD/DVD set. If you’ve ever been to a DJ Shadow live show (especially since 1999 when the visuals began to get seriously impressive) you know what to expect: a DJ on stage that looks miniscule in relation to the array of equipment and cameras surrounding him. The ‘In Tune and On Time’ CD and DVD serves to capture that environment and the music that usually results from DJ Shadow playing infront of a couple of thousand people surrounded by samplers and turntables. In Tune and On Time is DJ Shadow’s resume performed live. Some of the tracks run at 2-3 minutes in length, some of which are condensed from the original 8 – 12 minute tracks. So, any repetition or slowness in the music is streamlined and eliminated.

The Outsider (Universal 2006)

This album is a big, big departure from DJ Shadow’s signature sound; it covers a large range of styles and genres, including hyphy, indie rock, blues, spoken word, punk-rock and hiphop. Upon release, The Outsider got a lot of mixed reviews – mostly leaning towards the negative. However, this is an interesting example of an album that when considered as a collection of tracks falls flat compared to the merits of its individual parts. There are some really outstanding tracks on this – most notable is ‘This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way)’ (video below) which really showcases the musical lessons Shadow has learned since creating Entroducing some 11 years earlier. Shadow say’s himself, “There’re songs on this album that I think blow away almost anything else I’ve ever done. I think song for song it’s the best album I’ve ever made.”. The inclusion of Hyphy and it’s key proponents E-40 and the Federation, Keak da Sneak (Keak was supposedly the first to use the term ‘Hyphy’ on wax back in 1994) and Turf Talk suprised a lot of people. To Shadow’s credit it was music he was feeling at the time and wanted to include it on his record as it was a bay-area phenomenom that he felt deservered to be represented. He told Skinny Magazine on the eve of the release of The Outsider “I just sat down to make a record that reflected what I like and the type of music that I care about. Being from and living in the Bay Area, I sort of fell in to listening to Hyphy stuff, and it’s the most potent type of rap that the Bay Area has come up with since the early 90s. So it was really exciting when it came along and rather than do what I would probably have done in the past and go ‘well gee, I’m a guy who mainly works with samples, so I guess this is just gonna pass me by’ I embraced it.”. The results are varied in as much as the Hyphy collaborations sit with the varied style of genres peppered throughout the album as well as you would expect. That said, this is definitly Shadow’s most challenging record (for the listener at least) in that it lacks the instant gratification of his previous works but is definitly the most creatively diverse record he has produced to date.