I’ve never been an out­ra­geous Aesop Rock fan. In fact, this is the first album of his I bought. And I bought it purely on the strength of El-P’s almighty recent mas­ter­piece. I fig­ured maybe the qual­ity would bleed through to his label­mate and friend, com­ing so hot on the heels of I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. It cer­tainly did. Mix­ing Aesop’s own pro­duc­tions with long­time pro­ducer Block­head, he has crafted an pow­er­house of a hip-hop record here. The beats are tough, the words are com­plex, and like ISWYD, the hooks are catchy as hell. I’m gonna be hon­est, though, I have no idea what he is talk­ing about most of the time. Open­ing “Keep Off The Lawn” sets the tone. Strong boom-bap, some gui­tars, and that thick thick bazooka tooth MC style. The “Jesus walks” child outro is a fun lit­tle inter­lude into the Block­head pro­duc­tion, “None Shall Pass,” with it’s lovely lilt­ing melody and hyp­notic 4/4. “Cat­a­comb Kids,” not sur­pris­ingly, is a pretty dark one, as are the next cou­ple. “Fumes” is like a badass theme song for an ille­gal car rac­ing TV show, with its tom rolls, slinky and stac­cato bass line, and orches­tral flour­ishes. Fol­low­ing it up with “Get­away Car” is bril­liant, fea­tur­ing guest Breeze Brewin, and gives you a sense of a fast mov­ing escape, all the while bump­ing the trunk. El-P makes his first appear­ance on the laid­back “39 Thieves,” which also has some deft scratch­ing giv­ing you extra tex­ture. “Cit­ronella” is a West Coast G-Funk revolution…this should be blar­ing out of a L.A. win­dows. “No City” fea­tures some Shake­spearean voiceover-ness: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost / for want of a shoe, the horse was lost / for want of a horse, the rider was lost / for want of a rider, the bat­tle was lost / for want of a bat­tle, the king­dom was lost / and all for the want of a horse­shoe nail.” The music and lyrics are equally tragic and poetic, with lithe rhodes lines, and a nos­tal­gic tale of child­hood. My favorite song is the closer, “Cof­fee,” fea­tur­ing truly oth­er­worldly vocals by The Moun­tain Goats’ John Darnielle, who basi­cally sounds like an old female soul singer on this. The drums on this song are amaz­ing, sound­ing com­pletely live, with a swag­ger and bump of unreal pro­por­tions (Aesop refers to them as “ani­mal drums”), but, of course, it’s all down to the amaz­ing sam­ple choices and pro­gram­ming of Block­head. The John Darnielle outro is where the song reaches its ecsta­tic nadir. “I crawled down / to the base­ment / when the weather got cold / like a lost lamb / return­ing to the fold…” It’s a fan­tas­tic end to the album… which brings me to the one down­fall in an oth­er­wise per­fect album: the pres­ence of a hid­den track that pops up 2 mins after “Cof­fee” ends. Why do artists/labels do this? Darnielle’s voice per­fectly takes us out of this album. The min­i­mal, bluesy track sounds like an out­take… some­thing that wasn’t felt to fit with the whole album. Please stop doing this!