Consumer Guide Album

DJ Shadow: Live! In Tune and On Time [Geffen, 2004]
Recombinant is the idea with any DJ, but who'd expect even Shadow to make a live album worth hearing twice? Yet this hits-and-obscurities set is cannier than that of rock bands with twice as many titles to choose from: pieces of Endtroducing and Private Press reconfigured to mesh with pieces of Preemptive Strike and Psyence Fiction while and generating the same old illusion of inevitability. Sounded so right it got me to watch the bonus DVD version. Some of it, anyway--better his wrists and fingers than the superimposed film clips of freeway traffic and such assembled for the ticket buyers. A-