With its ongoing Blue Series, Thirsty Ear has striven-- with varying degrees of success and innovation-- to forcibly boggle the practical vocabularies of modern jazz, electronics, and hip-hop. And as evidenced by 2003's Antipop Consortium Vs. Matthew Shipp, the Blue Series' cross-textual platform appears to be a perfect fit for former Antipop iconoclast Beans and his tweaked, non-linear trajectory. So it seems natural that for his third full-length solo album, Beans has returned to Thirsty Ear and enlisted the heavyweight jazz rhythm section of bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake to operate in a stripped-down, post-bop trio format.
Given Beans' absurdist, loose-wired tongue and the adventurous, often radical discographies of his sidemen one might reasonably expect Only to ignite some serious non-idiomatic free-form fireworks. Instead, the three musicians choose to maintain a cordial distance, and their resulting electro-funk collaborations generally fizzle into the same vague, middling inconsistency which has too often plagued Beans' solo work.
Beans has long been one of hip-hop's most genuinely inscrutable eccentrics, an impression magnified here by the decision to identify each of Only's songs by a seemingly random number rather than a title. In a way this makes perfect elliptical sense, as none of these tracks contain recognizable choruses or lyrical hooks to the extent of previous Beans retro-futurist transmissions like "Mutescreamer" or "Structure Tone". In fact, more than half of the tracks here are either entirely or predominantly instrumental, concentrating an unwise degree of attention on Beans' light-fingered production rather than his loopy, open-streaming lyrical flow.
This approach does allow Parker to own the opening "5", first by drawing a subtle bowstring and then lumbering into a rubbery double-bass line, while Drake adds deft accompaniment with Meters-like precision. On this track and the dub-figured "1", Beans' contributions are almost invisible, as he uses a low-tech assortment of electronics to scribble in the margins. As the album progresses, however, the music's limited palette begins to unduly handcuff the rhythm section, and on longer tracks like the inconsequential "20" Parker and Drake jog in place as if waiting for Beans to make something happen, playing foursquare beats that could've been generated by any two available session guys.
When Beans does find occasion to open his mouth, he immediately goes on the defensive to preemptively disarm his critics. "Patron saints of mediocrity/ attempt at mocking me?" he asks incredulously on "198", before declaring himself "your baby girl's backside-splitter." He does get down to some vintage rapid-fire, surrealist boasting on "4" (with one-liners like "Got you wearing an expression like a burst balloon" or "I spill enough blood to paint a house") although at points his vocal timbre and brusque delivery can come to bear a rather alarming resemblance to Wesley Willis. But this entertaining, if typically bewildering, vocal barrage is the exception on Only, an album of missed opportunities that illustrates the widening disconnect between Beans' maverick self-image and the actual potency of his muddled, scattershot creations.
