Album review - The Mountain Will Fall

DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut Entroducing represented a coming of age for sampling culture but was also a straitjacket for the artist born Josh Davis. He’s spent the past 20 years trying to escape the record’s legacy, with often enervating and occasionally half-cocked results.

But the 43-year-old has finally located the ‘reset’ button, with a new album that conspicuously rejects Entroducing’s cut’n’paste mode of production and instead embraces real instruments and sample-free beats (he has lately sworn off sampling perhaps recognising that, after years of “crate digging” it had become an artistic dead end).