- This Sydney show marked the end of a 7 month Western world tour for Shadow - and he didn''t fail to impress - delivering a well-paced, crowd-pleasing two hours of his own hits and hip-hop rarities.
I unfortunately missed opening acts Katalyst and Bliss N Eso because I was catching Pnau at Homebake - but I arrived at the almost-full Hordern just as Shadow hit the stage with the spacey opener Fixed Income, the song which would bookend his meandering, diverse and likeable set.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m a recent arrival to DJ Shadow - so I’m not a purist who neccessarily favours old stuff over new stuff, but he did try to satisfy new and old fans alike.
He pulled out all the danceable tracks from his recent Private Press (which he kept mentioning like an advert), a good portion of 1996’s Endtroducing (yes, Organ Donor!) - and a few rarities (Holy Calamity from The Handsome Boy Modelling School was a treat, doubled in length with some massive drum breaks). His self-described anti-war single Six Days was dedicated to "the two biggest idiots in the world - Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush", followed by raucous applause from the audience made up of individually-dressed and incredibly well behaved 20 and 30 something’s.
A dark and brooding Blood on the Motorway (looped back into Fixed Income) finished the main set.
For the encore, Shadow demoed something new he’s been working on - a video sampler. Throughout the night 3 screens showed cool projections ranging from satellite collages to moving face puzzles to animations of a car crashing Nixon. For the encore, he did a simple manic drum piece on his sampler - except synched with visual accompaniment from a weird instructional video. A crazy novelty show of talent? Yes.
Then came the song I'd been waiting all night for - the incredibly danceable electro-clash tinged closing track You Can't Go Home Again - which extended into some distorted Sonic Youth-inspired madness and a bent High Noon and Midnight in a Perfect World cross-over.
A couple of minor flubs aside, it showcased the technical wizardry of an innovational artist, complete with some obligatory wicked scratching. While this multi-talented producer might still finding his feet with his live show, it still sounded phat, I danced too much and Shadow truly showed himself.