Aesop Rock is a name that’s always been missed frequently in hip-hop, given he still follows the doctrine of letting an album breathe for a few years before releasing another, and with it being nearly a half decade since we received his previous LP None Shall Pass, Skelethon is most welcome without needing to earn much anticipation given his reputation.
Skelethon shows us Aesop continuing to move away from his more traditional days of simpler beats backing his unrivaled intricate lyricism, with dense breakbeats and instrumental U-turns taking place immediately with the atmospheric opener “Leisureforce,” crossing genres much in the way we saw with last year’s Hail Mary Mallon collaboration with Rob Sonic and DJ Big Wiz to create yet another pioneering blood type of hip-hop with his metaphor-heavy verses and unpredictable intention. While the conveyance of freshly-tapped muses seems a key motif of Skelethon, Aesop maintains his advanced stance as the forefront instrument of the tracks on a level incomparable to the typical philosophy of song construction and vocal leveling in the general idea of music.
However, there’s a yawning distance between Aesop and the instrumentals, which disperses varying levels of positives and negatives: under his continually evolving experimentation with linguistics, Aesop’s brand of hip-hop demands a vocal dominance, though his heightened placement, at times, leaves a talented, though muffled discordance behind him in the haphazard instrumentation he weaves within. The single “Zero Dark Thirty” exemplifies Aesop’s perfect equilibrium, though is offset in the company of records like “Cycle To Gehenna” and “Crows 1” where the stacks of effects and revolving strokes allow the beats too much power, creating a competition with the volume of Aesop’s organic style. A lot of this could be attributed to the fact that Skelethon is entirely produced by Aesop, which is an aberration along a career whose wingspan is primarily written by the beatwork of Blockhead, Omega One and El-P, but we won’t hypothesize on matters hiding the truth in their root. It’s nothing to discredit Aesop’s production skills--the end supposition is mainly that he might be too good to be producing himself.
Lyrically, Skelethon is reined by the same astonishing galaxy of language and imagery we’ve seen since Music for Earthworms in ’97. It’s difficult to contextually decode what Aesop is saying, though the brilliance of his music has always been its ability to produce mood without making immediate sense. The infinite potential for interpretation keeps the vocals from staling, and offers something of a challenge to the listener dependent upon the mood to listen analytically, or simply enjoy the norm-breaking poetry. Aesop serves up the most clarity in “Ruby ’81,” which is lyrically reminiscent of flash fiction in the way it details a drowning child being saved by the family dog on the Fourth of the July, but from there, the undefined “you” throughout the album lacks definite identification, though it’s reasonable to wonder on the idea that you probably have some relation to the subject.
The drought between None Shall Pass and Skelethon called a lot of considerations that Aesop might be preparing to finally hit the permanent rest, but the experimentation on tracks like “Saturn Missiles,” “Leisureforce” and “Grace” promise that the creative gyroscope is stably fueling a forward trek into angles of the genre that your usual mainstream production line emcee is incapable of envisioning. With the obvious crucibles come losses; tracks like “Racing Stripes” and “1,000 O’Clock” run a little too far from the abundance of darker tones on the album, and the comedic bases interrupt the pace Aesop’s music is so strongly founded on. In many ways, the multiple complexities in the songs imply Aesop creating a challenge for himself, which may explain why he chose to self-produce the album; however, the double-edged truth of Skelethon is that while conquering plenty, Aesop has left himself with a fair amount to work on, but despite the lack of successes, the uncensored exhibition of self-growth, even at Aesop’s caliber, is something to not only respect, but appreciate. With such a breadth of advancement in style, Skelethon assures us that Aesop’s artistic visions are far from blinding, and that, as usual, fortune-telling has no place in his music from our standpoint. You don’t put out a track like the confessional "Gopher Guts" and permanently call it a day, especially when the final echo of the album is "on and on and on and on."
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