DJ SHADOW - Action Adventure Tour

For over 30 years, Josh Davis has expressed his passion, taste, and values through the music he creates as DJ Shadow. The name alone evokes a high watermark for instrumental hip-hop and composition. From his first masterpiece Endtroducing..., to the genre-hopping UNKLE release Psyence Fiction, to the otherworldly elegance of The Private Press and its iconic single “Six Days,” to his underrated Bay Area celebration The Outsider, his work in the ‘90s and first decade of the 2000s is as essential as it is hard-to-pin-down. In the 2010s, Shadow released the sprawling The Less You Know, the Better, with its muscular forays into rock music, and closed the decade with The Mountain Will Fall and Our Pathetic Age, both very ambitious, risk-taking albums that boasted some of his best rap collaborations by working with Run the Jewels, Nas, and De La Soul, among others.

The album has a cinematic quality, especially in its sequencing. The last quarter, from “Fleeting Youth” through “Reflecting Pool” and “Forever Changed,” is as cathartic as a well-told story, and ends on a triumphant note, with “She’s Evolving.” The oldest recording on Action Adventure, it’s another happy accident that nearly didn’t make the album. Initially Shadow doubted including a song from the cursed early days of lockdown and planned to end the album with a much sadder track. But it didn’t sit right and he kept returning to “She’s Evolving”—until it stuck.

The title Action Adventure evokes the halcyon days of video store browsing, and it’s fitting that he provides a crowd pleasing ending. Of course, this is still a DJ Shadow album, so don’t mistake that for anything corny. This is a record of mature sparseness, a revitalising and focused release that suggests a refined late period from a grandmaster of our time. “Rightly or wrongly, I’m not thinking about anybody’s musical wants or desires but my own,” he says.

DJ SHADOW plays Felons Barrel Hall February 18th.