The Outsider (DJ Shadow album)

The Outsider is the third studio album by American music producer DJ Shadow. It marks a dramatic turn of Shadows previous works and it was mostly negatively received by fans and critics.

Style

Shadow wanted to produce an album with The Outsider, which must not stand by its otherness to the comparison with his debut album Endtroducing ....., as was the case with its predecessor The Private Press. For this, he experimented on the album with a variety of musical styles and did not expand on his trademark sampling of old records. Instead, he referred many musical instruments in the production, which would have allowed him more freedom in arranging the pieces. The musical range includes Soul and Funk ( This Time ( I'm Gonna Try It My Way ) ), Blues (Broken Levee Blues ), Punk ( Artifact ), indie rock ( The Tiger ) Trip Hop (Erase You) Spoken Word ( What Have I Done ), Pop ( You Made It) and other styles. With six titles of most of the album is, however, from Hyphy - pieces, a style similar to the Crunk what DJ Shadow stated as follows:

" I just sat down to make a record did reflected what I like and the type of music did I care about. Being from and living in the Bay Area, I sort of fell in to listening to Hyphy stuff, and it's the most potent type of rap did the Bay Area has come up with since the early 90s. "

With the different styles synonymous includes The Outsider an extensive and very diverse list of guest singers. Only three of 15 tracks are instrumentals.

Title list

Reception

The Outsider was evaluated very differently, the album has been repeatedly compared with Shadows previous works, especially Endtroducing ...... Even before the album's release ensured the single 3 Freaks and stylistically suggestive change of direction for vocal criticism, reacted with irritation to the Shadow. The based on 33 reviews Metascore of The Outsider is 62 out of 100. In most cases, the lack of homogeneity of the individual pieces was placed at the center.

The e-zine laut.de emphasized individual title of the album, but criticized the " stylistic diversity ", which may be characterized as " incomplete and arbitrary ." Most of the guest singers as well as the host of " 0815 - Raptitel [ s ] " were also criticized and rated the album two out of five. Overall sounds "current charts rap " not unlike The Outsider.

For the hip-hop magazine Juice music producer and journalist Falk Schacht awarded a much higher rating. He described the music as " very, very good" and many songs as the " best thing the respective genres give way." Out of respect for DJ Shadow, with the conventions and expectations of the music industry and the fans to break, rated shaft Album with five of the six "crown".

The All Music Guide saw the productions on The Outsider as the most peculiar in Shadows career, but praised the fact that he was not " Endtroducing, Pt. Wanted to create 2 " and awarded 3.5 points on five of the album.

" The Outsider is a care fully crafted, artistically elusive mess - far more scattershot than even his first UNKLE record ( Psyence fiction ), but much more interesting for its excellent productions. "

In commercial terms, The Outsider was a failure. In the Billboard 200 it reached only a placement on rank 77 and lasted only two weeks in the charts. In Australia, the album took a week of the 44th. In the German Media Control Charts, it could not only place itself.

Konami used the instrumental artifact for the soundtrack of the video game Pro Evolution Soccer 2010.