| Under-underground emcee Aesop Rock's Float begins with the terse exhalation, "So I heard y'all wanna float" and continues with warp-speed rhyming over minimal accompaniment that could easily mistaken for a hip-hop Young Marble Giants if the incessant hi-hat tics weren't double-backing. In this maddening mix, a stream-of-consciousness rhyme allows for cerebrum burning art-house statements like "The villain of my Kabuki hologram / I hobble with hollow hands" and "I'm Bilbo Baggins with stilts tippin' the Petri dish / Beached fish on the shores with a feast of wits eats the corpse." This is a long way from "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire." A startling combination of agile fluidity rapped over frighteningly skeletal beats, Aesop Rock is bohemian rambler that updates the literary Digable Planets formula with the ferocity of a punk purist. With a burning baritone reminiscent of Michael Franti, the hyper-literate Aesop Rock singes with beat-poetry ambling so dense that his double-tracked vocals fall over each other into hypnotic discordance. The sound of Aesop Rock's tumbling cadence is continuously flowing and mostly incomprehensible due to its sheer velocity. If Canibus and Rza can shoot polysyllabic verbosity with the funky syncopation of a Bootsy Collins bass-line, Aesop's cadence is more analogous to a marching band or a machine gun. Jackhammer flow over dark production, including dub influenced guitar lines, funkily minimal percolating percussion, vibraphone echo, incessant reed ensembles, and the occasional scratchy soul workout? Yeah, I think we want to float. - Ink 19 |
2XLP/Out Of Print