The DJ who knew too much

Josh Davis (aka DJ Shadow) rocked the music world with his 1996 debut release “Endtroducing.”

With a masterpiece of an LP constructed entirely of samples of rarely heard recordings, Davis did no less than bring the American mainstream its first serious dosage of the rarities-obsessed hauntology movement.

Unfortunately, DJ Shadow doesn’t really deal in hauntology anymore. At least not in a serious way.

“The Less You Know, the Better” is a typical hip-hop album relative to the basement-rummaging greatness of the DJ’s past.

Guest vocal appearances from Talib Kweli, Tom Vek and Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano make the record a horse of a far different color than the early Shadow discs that sampled an interview on drumming released by the Standard Oil Company of California.

Davis finds some success with the effectively creepy “Sad and Lonely” and “(Not So) Sad and Lonely,” and “Give Me Back the Nights” is a harrowing piece more reminiscent of Anaal Nathrakh than any past DJ Shadow material.

The conventional nature of much of the rest of the album is what makes the brilliance of “Endtroducing” feel like an even more distant dot in the rearview mirror.