The Mountain Will Fall

It won't dethrone Endtroducing... from the pantheon but at last Davis has rediscovered the hidden door to that entrancing night-time world. [Aug 2016, p.111]

The Mountain Will Fall utilizes a wealth of live performances and ingenious programming to create an album that’s funky, futuristic, and thrilling for new fans and old heads alike.

Once the onslaught of ideas becomes less disorienting, however, it just feels impressive in its inventiveness.

The methods have changed but Shadow's unorthodox sense of rhythm remains reassuringly familiar.

The Mountain Will Fall is DJ Shadow's best album in over a decade, largely because it is his most consistent since "The Private Press."

There's a slow burn to many of the tracks, movements building like waves, and when they crash, it's glorious. When they fail to, it's all the more frustrating. But those high points are as high as any artist alive.

Shadow's beats programming remains formidable, as he steers clear of standard bangers in favor of something far more difficult to pin down. This isn't an album built for dancing. It's more about its rhythmic intricacy, a master class for connoisseurs of nuanced production.

It still stands tonally a much stronger package than his last two releases and is filled with far more highs than lows.

The Mountain Will Fall is only somewhat transcendent in its quiet moments, and the highs are too few and ephemeral. It’s quaint--a step away from the zeitgeist, but not quite future enough.

Some moments are so bleak that they could be titled descriptively as "What Does Your Witch House Look Like, Pts. 1-2," yet the whole thing sounds like it was created in a state of fevered inspiration.

DJ Shadow's solid fifth LP shows that he still has the chops to cut a good record when he's not doing a complete gear change (The Outsider) and then turning down the wrong road at full speed (The Less You Know, the Better).

He's hit the sweet spot between fresh and the familiar. [Aug 2016, p.83]

The repetition of the word “mambo” over another messy beat fails to do much. There’s too much going on to really make much sense of what’s happening. Shadow quickly makes up for that with two of the most alluring tracks on the record. “Ashes To Oceans” features British jazz composer and trumpeter Matthew Halsall, providing a gorgeous contribution to the already haunting composition. On “Pitter Patter,” rain-fall piano notes permeate the track while producer Bleep Bloop and Nite School Klik associate/trap producer G Jones give it an ethereal feel.

Far from aiming for some grand unified statement, The Mountain Will Fall feels a lot more like a DJ set--a curated grab bag of ideas that overlap and collide, sometimes in unexpected ways.