Early in his career, back when he was still a college-radio striver a couple years away from inspiring Mixmag to coin the term “trip-hop,” DJ Shadow made his way doing what hip-hop producers usually did: creating beats for rappers. He built up a promising résumé, from his self-released 1991 mixtape Hip Hop Reconstruction from the Ground Up (featuring a drums-of-the-apocalypse remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em”) to his time making G-funk-deconstructing classics with neo-Panther and Bay Area MC Paris, in 1992, to his run on Solesides, starting in 1993, crafting beats for Blackalicious and Lateef the Truth Speaker. But once Endtroducing..… blew up in 1996, Shadow’s aptitude for abstract instrumental beats took center stage. And with rare exceptions—Kool G Rap and Mike D taking turns confronting “Drums of Death” on UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction; a hyphy detour on The Outsider (which, say what you will, gave us a great E-40 track); the Posdnuos/Kweli backpacker summit on The Less You Know, the Better’s “Stay the Course”—his music was pegged, usually unfairly, as hip-hop for people who didn’t like rap.
If the fact that the Run the Jewels collab “Nobody Speak” became far and away the biggest crowd-pleaser on last year’s The Mountain Will Fall doesn’t put the Timbs to that theory, the leading twofer on follow-up EP The Mountain Has Fallen probably should. There’s no ’90s-vet rapper’s-rapper quite like Nas, and few MCs this decade who’ve reached EDM and indie audiences on their own honest terms as successfully as Danny Brown, so bringing them in for collaborations reads like a canny move on the surface. But Shadow’s history of fuck-what-you-think iconoclasm puts these collaborative highlights in a more musical context that pushes past simple optics.
For instance: What do you even expect from “Shadow produces Nas” when both artists have been repeatedly burdened with the expectation of returning to their debut forms? Nas has been keeping quiet since his fine 2012 comeback, Life Is Good, save a few stray singles that keep up his future-focused elder-statesman vibe. So hearing him amped and inspired is always welcome, even when it’s a little thematically scattershot. “Systematic” seems lyrically torn between fuck-the-system calls to “occupy all streets” and hood-mogul dreams of tech ventures—a tension that gave it a self-aware spot on the “Silicon Valley” soundtrack while nodding to Nas’ investments with his own QueensBridge Venture Partners. At least you have a jittery, propulsive electro-G-funk beat to ponder late capitalism to; it’s almost like a direct nod to Nas’ predecessors in Queens’ Juice Crew, considering it hits a lot of the same dirty, low-end synth squawks as Masta Ace’s “Born to Roll.”
Meanwhile, Danny Brown sets up his own conflict on “Horror Show,” playing both to and against the type he spent much of Atrocity Exhibition staring down like an enemy: the manic maniac in rock-star threads spending stacks on “a bag of drugs looking like trail mix.” The first verse’s Porsche-flooring coke hubris links up to the second’s undertone of doomed self-loathing via a bouncy sing-song chorus somewhere between shaming himself and threatening everyone else: “Welcome to my horror show/Horrible, how I will do all of you.” Danny’s at his broadest here, but when his broadest sounds a lot like the Weezy ’07-via-Alice Cooper ’73 monster that made his last three albums throat-clenchers, all that’s left to do is head-nod. And even if the lumbering galoot of a beat that Shadow builds for him is horrorshow more in the Dark Carnival sense, rather than A Clockwork Orange, it’s the perfect excuse for him to stomp around with some of the most no-bullshit battering-ram drums and basslines he’s ever done.
That said, there’s not much of the beat-chopping restlessness that’s laced his best tracks, neither on the rap cuts nor the two instrumentals that round things out. “Good News” is a weird little slice of ’70s-prog kick/snare/synth noodling that alternately sounds like a slick cut-up and a drunken attempt to push a malfunctioning Moog up a flight of aluminum stairs. (You almost expect Hannibal Buress to improvise a silly talkbox song over it.) There’s a bit more nuance in the closing “Corridors,” an instrumental featuring string arrangements by Academy Award-winning composer Steven Price; it’s largely in keeping with the beat-scene excursions of The Mountain Will Fall and picks up the post-dubstep rhythmic intricacy that Burial left off his last single. But once the orchestral bits start overwhelming the intricate bass-music locomotion Shadow’s built to a crest, its cinematic flourishes turn a strong composition into a score in search of a super-powered fight scene—impressive, but emotionally distant. The three good songs on this EP could be streamlined into The Mountain Will Fall’s overall structure well enough, but the two rap collabs are the clear highlights. It’s fine hearing Shadow continue to work in new modes, but sometimes it’s better to hear him finding interesting new angles in his old ones.
