Sacramento, California native Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, is on a hip-hop mission. Not the hip-hop of today's misogynist, gun-toting, money-flashing elite, though. Shadow looks to the originators of the style--like Public Enemy, Run-DMC and Grandmaster Flash--for inspiration. Knowing that all around him is indeed vanity, Shadow takes hip-hop's sampler-happy, cut-and-paste esthetic and creates a stunning sonic palette on Endtroducing..., one of the most celebrated hip-hop records in recent memory.

Signed to the influential Mo Wax label in the U.K., where trip-hop and drum-and-bass are the new styles of soundclash, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... more closely reflects U.K. artists like Portishead and Coldcut than anything from the domestic hip-hop Nation. In broad stretches of experimental color or little snippets of spoken-word weirdness, DJ Shadow weaves a humorous, exotic, always grooving record.

In true MC fashion, Shadow introduces himself in the first few bars of "Best Foot Forward," as a rapper blurps "Just your favorite DJ saviour"--and the boast fits. On "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt," a clanging drumbeat underpins an eerie piano figure as ethereal voices float overhead like a ghostly choir. Later, an astrologer speaks of "assimilating and distributing all he receives," accurately describing the vinyl-scratcher's creed. "The Number Song" parodies the Jackson Five hit with a sample of a Korean cover band; "Changeling" drifts lazily over woozy bass lines and broken, reverberating sound effects; "Stem/Long Stem" is a bracing hardcore assault combining harp and cello with thrash drumming. Endtroducing... blends beauty and paranoia in the perfect headphone environment. It's music to drug to, to dance to, to daydream by, an insular, hallucinogenic album hovering at a screwy sonic intersection.