Reviews
Ranked #2 on Melody Maker's List of 1996's "Albums of the Year.", Included in Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90's.", Ranked #15 in Spin Magazine's "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s.", 4 Stars (out of 5) - "...Shadow's brief is to develop a totally sample-based idiom, weaving a cinematically broad spectrum so deftly layered that the sampling-is-stealing argument falls flat...", "...Unfolding lik a surreal film soundtrack on which jazz, classical, and jungle fragments are artfully blended with turntable tricks and dialogue snippets, ENDTRODUCING... takes hip-hop into the next dimension." - Rating: A-, Ranked #18 in Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" -- "The album returned hip hop's focus from the MC to the music.", 5 (out of 5) - "...an undeniable hip-hop masterpiece....DJ Shadow remembers that sampling is an art form.", "This remains a stone classic, channeling Afrika Bambaataa's genre-splicing, DJ-booth mysticism into a fully realized studio epic...", 4 Stars (out of 5) - "...The DJ built songs out of layer upon layer of sampled instruments and other sound fragments, most of which he processed, looped and re-arranged far beyond recognition....funky rhythms that never sound like they've been cut and pasted together...", "One of the Best Hip-Hop, Yes Hip-Hop-Records Ever Made.", 4 stars out of 5 - "A decade on, DJ Shadow's affirmatory essay on record collecting as a creative endeavour has lost none of its grandeur.", 9 (out of 10) - "...layers slinky break-beats with sampled sounds--anything from church bells to War Of The Worlds and, egad, Tears For Fears....a cosmic-chamber feel complete with choruses of fallen angels, plucked harps, Mellotron, and cello...", Ranked #12 on Spin's List of the "20 Best Albums of '96.", "...Shadow makes records the way Robert Rauschenberg made his combines: from scraps, pop artifacts, the things other people throw away....While some of his tracks float serenely on a cloud of jazzy phrasing and ambient textures, Shadow always lands on his beat...", 4 stars out of 5 - "It's an elegy from a vinyl mausoleum, a sonic fiction assembled by a keen-eared archaeologist.", "Some consider...ENDTRODUCING... a broadcast from hip-hop's near future. But that notion ignores how much this disc reaffirms the music's creative roots....ENDTRODUCING is pretty damn good, with Shadow demonstrating an unerring ear for motif and texture, touching on everything from dub to funk to groove-jazz...", Included in Q Magazine's "90 Best Albums of the 1990s.", "...Innovative arrangements and structures of sound are present here, reflecting a mind that is constantly summoning collage forms...", Bloody Essential - "...it flips hip hop inside out all over again like a reversible glove, and again, and again, and each time it's sudden and new. I am, I confess, totally confounded by it. I hear a lot of good records, but very few impossible ones....You need this record. You are incomplete without it.", Ranked #4 in the Village Voice's 1996 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll., "An instrumental album entirely composed of samples and influenced by both prog rock and Public Enemy was, at the time, revolutionary....Still unmatched in its carefree invention.", Ranked #5 in Nme's 1996 Critics' Poll.
