Endtroducing.....

Not only a hugely innovative album, but also one that reaches heights of musical perfection that few others can approach, this fully deserves 5 stars.

DJ Shadow is indeed an accomplished changeling, shifting from jazz aficionado to film composer to magnum turntablist in a matter of moments.

An undeniable hip-hop masterpiece ... DJ Shadow remembers that sampling is an art form.

The hippest hop ever.

“Endtroducing…” manages to create a mood onto which you can project anything – this is, perhaps, the primary triumph.

In many ways, Endtroducing . . . is a frustrating album ... Had the 23-year-old spent a little longer judiciously chopping and fine-tuning, we might very well be looking at trip-hop’s first (and possibly only) masterpiece.

Consisting mostly of hip-hop beats and retro sound effects, Endtroducing makes for a great listen. In fact, I bet I'll never get sick of it.

Unfolding like a surreal film soundtrack on which jazz, classical, and jungle fragments are artfully blended with turntable tricks and dialogue snippets, Endtroducing … takes hip-hop into the next dimension.

Entroducing practically folds you into its symphonic fantasia, the coming-of-age story of a 24-year-old bunk-bed dreamer.

DJ Shadow calls it hip-hop. We'll settle for groovy.

"I'm a student of the drums/But I'm also a teacher,' a voice intones at the start of the album. And Endtroducing..... is a good place to start studying for the next pop millennium.

A mosaic of sound, painstakingly assembled and deployed with gleeful disrespect for conventions of genre and the perceived wisdom of what "can" be done. Excellent and admirable.

Shadow's brief is to develop a totally sample-based idiom, weaving a cinematically broad spectrum so deftly layered that the sampling-is-stealing argument falls flat.