Pre-Emptive Strike [Best of]

This record is getting ripped on by a couple of reviewers for not being Endtroducing... or Private Press. They all agree that High Noon and Organ Donor are all that make this cd worth having and that is some straight-up bull$!@#. This was my introduction to Shadow and it might have taken a little while to really sink in, but it hooked me on his music and made me vow to pick up everything he laid his lily white hands upon. This record is like Neitzche's void opening up in your mind and fixing its dark gaze right into the center of you. I've just heard Joseph Campbell mention that poetry is a metaphor for all the mysteries of existence and this for me is a transcendent poem that has helped glimpse behind the mask of the mysteries.

Preemptive Strike is mostly slow and plodding, but each beat dropped lands right in the center of my head. It builds and builds, creating mischief from disparate sources of sound, weaving together a web that seems to form a story that you could almost make out if some of the pieces weren't missing. Some of the most affecting spoken samples are from "Johnny Got His Gun", as I later found out. Go see that movie if you like this record. If you enjoy "Diamond Sea" by Sonic Youth, "1983..." by Jimi Hendrix or "Revolution #9" by the Beatles, give this record a couple of spins through a pair of huge headphones.

Let me just say that my indtroduction to DJ Shadow has been really strange in comparison that of others. The first CD I got of his was The Private Press. While I loved it, it made Endtroducing, which I bought months later, sound dated. While it has since grown on me, for a while, I thought The Private Press was better.
This CD is by far the least inspiring of the stuff I've heard of Shadow's. The music is too sparse of many of the songs, I find. In Flux is just drums for the first 3 minutes, and while I've always found Shadow's percussion to be very robust and refreshing, I don't think it's enough to make a whole song.
The "What Does Your Soul Look Like" series was nice, the first one (in order, not how it's numbered on the box) being the best to me. But I was less than impressed that Shadow decided to put part 4 and part 1 on, both of which I'd heard on Endtroducing, and with only minimal changes to keep my interest.
But "High Noon" is a great track, reminiscent of Spaghetti Westerns (explaining the title), and the remix to Organ Donor is also good, and it's fresh enough that it doesn't remind me too much of the original.
Overall, this piece is the least of Shadow's work, in my opinion. Of course, much of it was earlier stuff, and he may not have found his niche until after it's completion. I'm still a big Shadow fan, and I will still buy his next album. Just hope I don't have to wait another 2 years for it.

I feel a sense of completion now that I own DJ Shadow's "Preemptive Strike!" This is supposed to be a collection of his earlier works--1993, I think and if you ask me the stuff here is just as current as his material on "Endtroducing", "Private Press" or "Psyence Fiction" even, which shows that the man has a way of making "classic" music. Just as dark and equally funky as his later material, Shadow still has a way with the turn-table, cranking out meandering beats to please and psychologically disturb you at the same time!