Hi, everyone. Greatthony Baketano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Aesop Rock album, Black Hole Superette.

Here we have a brand new LP from rapper, songwriter, producer, lyricist extraordinaire Aesop Rock, truly a veteran of the game at this point. At one time, he was on the cutting edge of the underground as one of the most verbose and meticulous wordsmiths to ever touch the microphone. And decades later, he is still very much that.

In the early 2010s, Aesop Rock took it upon himself to start undertaking production duties on his records, not just the rapping and the songwriting. And since then, he's managed to drop some of his most impressive, dense, and conceptual works to date, whether it's the incredible Impossible Kid or the almost impenetrable Spirit World Field Guide, and also the futuristic and dystopian, at many points, Integrated Tech Solutions.

Now, sidebar, Aesop hermetically sealing his creative process over the years has made it all the more interesting when he does detour into a collab project, with the likes of Tobacco or even long-time collaborator Blockhead, and you have to wonder when he finds the time or how the reconnection with the outside world even happens, especially considering this man has not performed live in almost 10 years at this point. With each new album cycle, he becomes more and more elusive and shadowy.

Now he's just at a point where he quietly grinds out these hour-long rap tomes with some of the most dizzying bars you'll ever hear. Check the opening bars to one of the lead singles on the record, the track "Checkers": "Suite of calluses, active and moving / Callous anomaly in the algorithm / Do the algebralculus / I'm all of Alexandria's information and aggregate / ruling elder, giving you the hell that melt the valuables." Pretty much Aesop in these bars describing his MO. He is a rap anomaly and loaded with more information and esoteric references than one of the most historic and legendary libraries in the world.

Now, writing like this, I think a more ignorant listener might categorize or label as lyrical miracle rap. However, what Aesop Rock does is most definitely not that, especially since most of the time that hip hop is rapped at lightning speed and it's just an assembly of words that don't really amount to all that much. It's just done for technical show. Meanwhile, there's actually substance and concrete topics to many of Aesop's songs, and he raps at a pretty steady pace, even if some of the wordplay is a bit confounding.

I mean, if there is a word or term to sum up Aesop's music pretty quickly and accurately, I would say it's maybe "cryptic," since many of his bars feel like an endless string of thesaurus words and esoteric ideas. In that respect, Black Hole Superette is the same old Aesop. He's just grown a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and he is now more than ever isolated in his own little creative world, which I think creatively has its upsides and downsides. The upside being that Aesop's music is consistently vivid, unique, and unlike anything else out there.

But by that same token, some of it is deeply unapproachable, and feel like trying to make your way out of a jungle of overgrown plant life in every direction. Most likely your arms will give out before you hack away enough of it to even escape. It can be a bit confounding, too, when an infatuation Aesop seems to have on a record is unforeseen. Black Hole Superette isn't just a cute album title and bit of album art, because there are numerous moments on this project where Ace is clearly hung up on the idea of the corner store, shopping products, consumerism, or the ecosystem of people and establishments in your surrounding neighborhood.

Take the opening track, for example, which is a description of a city walk to the corner store, but with an insane and surreal attention to detail. The way Aesop frames everything that is happening on his trip, the things he picks up, it's like he's doing this walk while on the most intense acid trip imaginable. Or maybe this is the point view of a person who views the outside world as overwhelming.

Again, Aesop is pretty married to this concept, as the release of this album coincides with a game, some first-person exploration experience for Windows, for Mac. It's on Steam as well. Some of the single art for this record lines up with this concept, too. Take the song "Checkers", for example, I mentioned earlier.

And there are more references to going to the store and shopping deeper into the album like on "Ice Sold Here" or "Costco" or the opening of "Steel Wool". However, like with Aesop's last LP, the concept doesn't seem to encompass every single thing going on with this album. Honestly, I feel like this guy's consciousness is too wide and too deep for one single theme to pin all of it in. You know what? I think that's a beautiful thing, especially since some of this album's most memorable and compelling moments are the ones that bring a bit of clarity, aren't necessarily related to this overarching theme in an obvious way, and feel like the sunlight breaking through the heavy canopy, covering this metaphorical jungle that I mentioned earlier.

I feel like this comes by way of, sometimes, a production that is playful or intriguing, like with the strangely exotic and very funky layers of samples on "Ice Sold Here". There's also "Movie Night", which features this crazy combination of organ funk and drumline percussion loops. The closing track is a surprisingly sentimental bit of production for Aesop, too. Some dusty chords, thinned-out bass, which gets a pretty lush instrumental treatment as the entire track just gets more layered and more dense. On this instrumental, Aesop uses the life of a childhood hamster as a jump off point to dive into this existential and nostalgic dissertation, which I actually get a lot more out of emotionally than much of these straight-up verbal crate-digging he's typically known for.

Like on the track "So Be It", where he says, "On his second Arabica, hecka hackles up / Edging outta latency, take me to the miraculum," which I think is a lot of effort to say that you're maybe a bit on edge after two coffees.

Now, I'm not saying Aesop should entirely give up what makes him him as a writer. There's just points where I question how much the extralingual gymnastics really adds to the substance of what he's saying.

Now, most of the time I do think it does, especially on moments like "Black Plums", where Aesop lyrically analyzes his place in the universe, making note of his insignificance with bars like, "I'm a particle, a minute quantity of matter / The least possible amount of data." There's also a very smart series of bars in the second verse that all make reference to traveling, commuting, lanes, moving.

So it is the tracks on the album that I think bring a relative amount of directness, but also depth, that I think have the hardest punch, just work the best. I think there's a stellar run of songs in the middle of the album where that is in fact the case, like on "Send Help", where I think in many ways Aesop tries to portray how his mind works, like he's in this state of anxiety and just needing to escape or turn inward and sees the way his brain puts these things to words almost as a cry for help: "I know that sound absurd as all hell / I don’t even know what I’m saying for certain / Surely it’s 'help', uhhhh help?"

There's also "John Something", which is a legit piece of jazz rap where Aesop tells one of the most compelling and linear tales of any of his recent albums, where he's deeply moved by the experience of being in a class and having been recommended a piece of art back in 1996, a documentary that just impacted him heavily. That meant more to him than the thing this speaker was actually supposed to be doing and talking about to the class.

There's also the track "Bird School", which in a way paints a very interesting scene with Aesop being infatuated with this very large flock of birds roosting in the midst of a migration pattern. And he does it again with so much detail that it just further proves that this man can truly rap about anything, and also managed to snap one of the catchiest hooks on the entire album to this very outlandish topic.

And as long as we're on the topic of marveling at animals, there's also the track "Snail Zero", which is a story all about snails turning up in a fish tank he recently bought for his girlfriend. You have the aquarium, you have the fish, then all of a sudden, a snail turns up in there. He doesn't want to kill the snail, just lets it live. But then before you know it, the snails are multiplying.

The final moments on the album, I think, are fine. It's really the closing track that personally hit me the hardest, as I do think it is one of Ace's most reflective and personal closers yet.

Overall, I thought Black Hole Superette was pretty great. Another skilled and idiosyncratic project from Aesop Rock in the catalog. But simultaneously, I do feel like there is a lot of material here that could have either been pared down or simplified in a way to make this project more manageable and digestible.

In addition to that, on this record, I do feel like there is a lot to his writing and even production style at this point that's getting a bit predictable. Like, he's not really pushing himself outside of his comfort zone on this one all that much, even with very impressive features on here from the likes of Lupe Fiasco and Homeboy Sandman and Armand Hammer. Speaking of which, I wish there was more to what Open Mike Eagle did on here other than just a very politely sung chorus.

But yeah, for the most part, this Aesop rock album, I'm feeling a strong 7 to a light 8 on this one.

Anthony Fantano, Aesop Rock, Forever.