There’s a thundering blast of sound that opens Our Pathetic Age, like someone was testing out a town’s tornado warning system, only to get distracted by the varying tones they were capable of producing. A minute later, it fades away, to the rattling hiss of a staticky swell. It’s almost the sonic equivalent of a warning sticker—“this isn’t going to be easy”—serving to prep listeners for the difficult journey that follows: Challenging, dark, and ambitious, this may be the most baldly confrontational and alienating work the artist has ever produced.
This isn’t to say DJ Shadow, real name Josh Davis, has reinvented himself as some avant-garde musician. This is still very recognizably the work of the man who concocted the genre-defining sounds of Endtroducing….. and The Private Press, and who more recently found fresh inspiration and creative heights with 2016’s The Mountain Will Fall. New tracks like “Slingblade” or the jazz-driven “Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work, Chaos, Law” retain the beat-based grooves that have always defined his output, with the warmth and fuzzy synths that draw listeners in. But other tracks push away with equally ferocious intent, defying any attempt to absorb the album as a smooth and cohesive whole. It’s not just because Our Pathetic Age is a double album, split between his almost wholly instrumental experiments on the first half, and a series of boldly shifting hip-hop collaborations on the second. Within both of these fundamentally stand-alone records are jarring, harsh tracks that shake up the flow of the music.
| Instrumental Suite |
| A1 | Nature Always Wins |
| A2 | Slingblade |
| A3 | Intersectionality |
| A4 | Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work, Chaos, Law |
| A5 | Juggernaut |
| B1 | Firestorm |
| B2 | Weightless |
| B3 | Rosie |
| B4 | If I Died Today |
| B5 | My Lonely Room |
| Vocal Suite |
| C1 | Drone Warfare |
| C2 | Rain On Snow |
| C3 | Rocket Fuel |
| C4 | C.O.N.F.O.R.M. |
| C5 | Small Colleges (Stay With Me) |
| C6 | Jojo's Words |
| D1 | Kings & Queens |
| D2 | Taxin' |
| D3 | Dark Side Of The Heart |
| D4 | I Am Not A Robot (Interlude) |
| D5 | Urgent. Important. Please Read |
| D6 | Our Pathetic Age |
