When Beans' former group, the groundbreaking Antipop Consortium, disbanded in 2002, he quickly re-emerged as a solo artist with 2003's spotty but sporadically thrilling Tomorrow Right Now. Pairing an adoration of classic Warp Records IDM with his rapid rambling, the record made cold fusion of party music-- its alien synth flourishes flawlessly fused with micro-crisp glitch-beats. A few short months later, he'd returned: Now, Soon, Someday was an instantly acclaimed (and very cred-securing) mini LP that showed Beans honing his mix of computerized froth and rabid flow, culminating in the mesmerizing electro-grooves of "Structure Tone", "Win or Lose You Lose", and the Bambaataa-esque headfuck "Gold Skull". Oh yeah, it also featured contributions from El-P and Prefuse 73.
Shock City Maverick, unfortunately, fails to carry Now's momentum. Instead, the new full-length is yet another wait-and-see moment. Maverick has a more consistent tone than either of Beans' previous records, but it also lacks the stand-outs of its predecessors, settling into bland production strokes that recede behind his always fascinating rhymes. On highlights like "Papercut", Beans augments his verbal barrage with steel-tight wirescapes. Against frigid electronics and a shiv-sharp beat, he slathers wicked absurdities like, "Never let a woman plant a flag on my testicles/ Love to fuck but don't fuck around." It's a moment of hope and crooked angularity, laying down a Run-DMC-on-ice cityscape that's shouting for Saturday nights and midnight jailbaiting. Coming after the scrambled intro "Light of the Damned", the song's insurgency could lead you to believe-- if only momentarily-- that Beans had reached his promise.
Sadly, Beans safeguards his most inspired production for his instrumental tracks. "You're Dead Let's Disco" opens with wavering church bells and jangled chimes, the sound of robotic prayers and mechanized piety. As its reverberating beat chips away at the solemn backdrop, he jams dense synth noises and robotic whinnying into the mix-- it's Kanye West breast-fed on Hugo and Dumas. But the track still seems embryonic. If Beans had flooded his chatterboxed rhymes atop the track, it might have been the focal point the album lacks.
"A Force on Edge", the second of the album's instrumentals, stumbles on broken cello strokes and static tangles. While the beat gets to its feet and slowly takes the song by the throat, the cellos mount an ethereal junkyard grind, and yet again, Beans' most quietly inspired chaos is left without the grip of his rhymes. "Death by Sophistication", too, chokes on a dull amorphous beat, its most unforgivable moment coming with Beans' unpleasant refrain, "Crowd screaming like a dick caught in a zipper." "I'll Melt You" exposes more of Beans' atypically over-arched lyricism. As its limp vintage-Warp backdrop steadies the bottom, rhymes like, "If Reese's Pieces increases your feces/ Whyn't get funky?" and, "Greedy with girls/ Half-naked in a tickle-fight/ Stroking my ego like a handjob," stick to the mic with cheap, sophomoric glee. The absurdity of such boasts and crude one-offs against the geek-star groove of his academic production is laughable, like a calc-whiz bragging about loosely imagined trysts to math-club cronies.
Beans always had a tendency to reach hard for coffee-shop poesie, but his brash schoolboy taunts sink past angstful overextension. Considering the regression in his production on Shock City Maverick, it's getting harder to imagine Beans ever living up to his Antipop potential. Pull out Arrhythmia again, and sigh along to what might have been.
