Album Review: DJ Shadow – Our Pathetic Age

For a guy who's been living in his own shadow since 1996, the jokes really do just write themselves when it comes to American producer Joshua Davis, aka DJ Shadow. Seeing as we already know how stellar Endtroducing..... was and how dry everything afterwards turned out to be, let's just cut to the chase. His latest album, Our Pathetic Age, is a fucking chore to sit through. You don't listen to this record, you sit through it.

It's a double album of mind-numbing instrumental beats on one side and completely average, though star-studded, guest feature rap on the other. The phrase "bored to tears" is bound to enter your mind more than once if you manage to make it all the way through this tired, 2deep4u slag on the modern, connected world. Seriously, just look at that cover art – talk about a Year 12 art project.

Side one opens with a lengthy run of tracks that are just confusingly awful. The beats from the CD Key Generator that came with your illegal copy of Photoshop are better than this stock drum machine crap. It's a shame too, because side two really has a nice handful of tracks with some inspired production and verses. Are those diamonds in the rough worth the hour-and-a-half price of admission though? Absolutely not.