DJ Shadow has long been obsessed with dystopian landscapes, and since the late 1990s, the Bay Area turntablist and hip-hop producer (aka Josh Davis) has released plenty of electronic music grounded in apocalyptic themes. But his ambitious new album Our Pathetic Age isn’t rooted in science fiction; it’s intended as a reflection of the now.
When announcing the record back in September, Davis spoke of a wide-ranging concept reflecting a world plagued by “rampant homelessness” and “generational poverty.” Citing institutional failure, widespread feelings of anger and confusion, and an entertainment culture grounded in distraction, he offered his mammoth double album—the first half all instrumental, the second dedicated to rap collaborations—as an attempt to find “light in darkness” and bring it to a generation seemingly glued to their devices.
The album’s opener, “Nature Always Wins,” appears to represent the sheer noise of social media, with Davis stirring up wave upon wave of gloomy sounds—maybe synths, maybe metal guitars—that conjure visions of electrodes flickering up a fiber-optic cable. The mood is ominous and sometimes chaotic: “Slingblade” attacks minor-key synths with stabbing snares, and “Intersectionality” whips new-wave arpeggios into a frenzy, capturing the ferocious back-and-forth energy of a fiery online debate.
As promised, the music flips between darkness and light: The funkier, euphoric bursts of bass driving the much more colorful “Rosie” and “Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work, Chaos, Law” prove that Davis hasn’t completely lost his optimism. But it’s a shame these lighter moments aren’t more frequent. The music really soars only when Davis stops trying to channel the paralyzing bleakness of the surveillance state and allows a bit more spring into his step.
The shifts in tone on the second disc are frequent. On the weeded-out summertime gem “Taxin’,” Dave East warmly reflects on climbing out of the “gutter,” while Run the Jewels’ El-P and Killer Mike endearingly pay tribute to their mothers on the strong “Kings & Queens,” a lush, soulful shot of nostalgia. But on “C.O.N.F.O.R.M,” Shadow’s old Quannum associates Gift of Gab and Lateef the Truth Speaker, along with relative newcomer Infamous Taz, compare life online to The Matrix (yawn), lament that no one memorizes phone numbers anymore, and rail against internet grocery stores. And “Rain on Snow,” featuring Wu-Tang philosophers Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, and Raekwon reflecting on the modern world, boasts a beat so dated—its distorted bass and turbo-charged synths are a sound Shadow has been recycling since UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction—that you find yourself waiting for one of them to start rapping about the Y2K bug.
Shadow deserves credit for spotlighting so many enigmatic underground characters, something he has done throughout his career, but the overabundance of ideas and conflicting styles quickly becomes jarring. Our Pathetic Age reflects the way much of Shadow’s post-Endtroducing material has lacked structure, with the producer happy to throw ideas at the page, even if many of them don’t stick. It’s ironic that the album’s scrambled nature might also be a casualty of the information overload of the always-online world that DJ Shadow set out to critique. Perhaps that’s the point, but it means this album, a whopping 91 minutes long, can be a real slog to sit through. After a while, it’s hard to resist the urge to simply log off.
Buy: Rough Trade
