"I am so completely off the goddamn grid/ It's not a question of addressing me, it's 'What do these symbols under the dresser mean?'" -Aesop Rock, "Crows 1"
Hack faith healers, stained glass Saint Peter's, black rainbows, ruby tides, jarred brains, magpies, hoarders, and allied forces licking zigzags while being dragged by horses. Antiquated gentlemen outlaws reduced to a Ferris wheel of vitriol. Miniature Raquel Welches, ghost crabs, butchers in bloody aprons, splintering motordrome walls of death, homemade mummies, bats, crypts, and Chuck Taylors with "Zulu" bombed on them in Buckle Font. Dope stone lions and maple donuts. There's no Rosetta to decrypt the Nighthawk Book of the Dead doubling as the mind of Aesop Rock.
Pick over Skelethon at your own peril. The portmanteau breaks down to the marathon of skeletons. 360 chambers of death, kid. Probably the most logical left turn for the Long Island-hatched rapper who warned "Abandon All Hope" on his first video: body splayed into a crucified scarecrow, blood and tar on the vocals, words loaned from the inscription above the Inferno.
By 23, he'd died 1,000 Deaths and vowed to die a thousand more. But time makes the melodramatic seem merely morbid and Aesop Rock is now 36-- old enough to have two eyes on the odometer and a psyche swamp-drained by the disintegration of labels, loves, and all carbon life around him. Skelethon is his sixth album, a retreat into the rabbit hole, the apartment as womb and tomb. Like he says on "Leisureforce": "don four walls like a wooden coat."
There is no clear autopsy for first single, "Zero Dark Thirty", where a "thousand virtues, kick the same bucket like Chinatown turtles." This is rap as Rorschach blot. I see it as one-part gentle eulogy for the early 00s underground scene that Rock once ruled, one-part requiem for the naïve certitude that cloaks all teen dreamers.
"Roving packs of elusive young, become choke-lore writers over boosted drums, in the terrifying face of a future tongue... Down from a huntable surplus to one."
Few eat off rap infinitely. Def Jux is dead and 93% of the Fat Beats generation scrounges rent money from increasingly rare spot dates, overseas collectors, and rich kids with money to blow on cameo fees. There were even rumors that Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox was panhandling uptown. Then there are those making dishonest moves to seem current, dudes who once penned purist "manifestos" and now collaborate with Ace Hood. Rock phrases it more tactfully: "folk being backed into what they most lampoon."
Nine years ago, Aesop Rock swore he'd never write another "Daylight". That's the closest thing he's had to a hit-- the three ring-hook that's closed out almost every one of his solo shows since 2001's Labor Days: "All I ever wanted to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way." Had he the desire to simplify his style and stay making off-kilter inspirational anthems for the artistically inclined, he could have been caking off independent coffeehouse baristas for decades. Instead, he created a surly alter ego named Bazooka Tooth and rapped about train bombers and acid trip adolescence. The Todd Solondz-grim cover of that album didn't help much. Picture a prep school Conan O' Brien Frankenstein in headgear being taunted by grotesque peers. Good times.
From jump, Rock said that he'd sanitize nothing for the sake of contemporary tastes and he's arguably more of a one-man solar system than ever before. Skelethon is his first real album without Blockhead beats. It's also his first without any guest rappers. In fact, the only real cameo is Kimya Dawson, who chants a necromantic hook on "Crows 1". Even then, she seems selected squarely because she was the best option to summon the spirits of the witches from Macbeth had they been into anti-folk. If anything, the semiotics have gotten subtler but more vivid. And he wasn't exactly churning out summer jams to start.
So there are no sequels. But "Zero Dark Thirty" may be the closest Rock is ever going to get to "Daylight" (save for maybe "Nightlight"). It offers a corollary: what happens when you get to arrange the pieces your way but the puzzle still doesn't fit. He sees "brown grass [on] both sides." The moral compass is "spinning batshit." He wonders if fans are "supporting the artist or enabling the addict." Both songs ultimately reject nihilism for the temporary salve of art. It updates the hero's plight to the present-day: resolved to evolve while retaining his claws. After all, claiming you've "failed all basic training, but have spent a couple Groundhogs Days with a Changeling" is really just a clever way to say "On to the Next One."
Other songs on Skelethon have spiritual ancestors. "Fryerstarter" merges the I Spy-the-LES approach of Float's "6B Panorama" with the toxic animism of "Basic Cable". The perspective revolves around Bob's Donuts on Nob Hill in San Francisco, Rock's home city for the last half-dozen years. The song's theme is faith via fried dough ("you can chew the eucharist in cruller form"), surrounded by an all-night zombie parade of insomniac sugar addicts, police, and thieves. While the self-assault of finale "Gopher Guts" is the most emotionally raw and confessional that he's been since "One of Four", the crack-up that haunted the end of the Daylight EP.
"Leisureforce" could pass for a less allegorical fraternal twin to Labor Days' "No Regrets"-- the cradle-to-the-grave story of Lucy, an artist who only wanted peace to paint her masterpieces. But rather than celebrate the joys of creation, "Leisureforce" catalogues its casual hair-pulling horrors. Yet Skelethon triumphs over those torments. It's the best-written rap album since Danny Brown's XXX, which it resembles in its ability to evoke the self-doubt, sleepless nights, and isolated focus required to finish something great. No surprise considering Brown said that he wrote out the short story raps of Rock's last solo album, 2007's None Shall Pass, to decipher their meaning.
It's always forced when people compare rappers to poets, but fuck it. Skelethon's imagistic processions of the damned remind me most of Ezra Pound's early Cantos and Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish", their own spiritual brine of burial rites, myths, pop culture, and personal anecdote. While the reaper-stalked motorcycle run of "Cycles to Gehenna" achieves the wind-blurred Bay Zen of "the edge" in Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels. If his claims are true and Rock rarely reads, then the influence is smuggled in second-hand via Tom Waits, his closest analogue and one of few admitted influences.
Should the misfits match, consider this Aesop Rock's Swordfishtrombones, a brilliant baleful experiment conducted by an ox-blade throated barker in his mid-30s, with a slant towards occult characters, and off beat percussion. Both share coffee-black humor and a gift for exploring the gopher holes of the underground. The man of Mule Variations would also appreciate the eccentric ghost of Camu Tao, remembered through Rock on "Racing Stripes". The ode to odd haircuts describes Tao's contingency plan to pay the rent: shaving his head George Jefferson-style to force himself inside long enough to make beats to acquire the bread to appease the landlord.
All weird scenes stress a recurring theme. "Grace" reveals the genesis of a stubborn disposition via the 11-year old Ian Bavitz enraging his dad by refusing to eat his vegetables. It also might be the funniest song Rock's written and a decade-late unintentional response to "Be Healthy". "Ruby '81" flashes back to a Fourth of July at five, when a toddler nearly drowned in a swimming pool while everyone was distracted by fireworks. "ZZZ Top" initially seems to only satisfy Ghostface's Killah’s basic requirement of tangled slang rap: get some official beats and say some fly shit over it. But upon repeat, you realize it’s the education of the young rebel, carving "Zoso" into his desk, "Zulu" on his Chuck's, and the Zeroes onto a bathroom stall. It grapples with the moment when childhood dies and permanent angst begins. Yet Rock gracefully dodges preciousness and melon-soft over-sentimentality.
Like Waits, Rock's lyrical gifts and cult-leader singularity often overshadows his musical prowess. Look at this review: 1,300 words on symbols and a paragraph to production. But Skelethon reveals how far Rock's come since the Bazooka Tooth-era, when his beats largely lacked swing and he hadn't yet fully synthesized El-P's industrial influence. His productions now switch between samples and live instrumentation, psychedelic guitars and fright night keyboards, 1980s 808s and beastly drum thrashes. Garage rock riffs married to phosphorescent synths exhumed from the same UFO graveyard as El-P and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
No one would've complained if Rock selected a few Blockhead beats for variety. But he compensates with the natural benefits of being a rapper/producer: these beats are bespoke. The rapping has never been better either, with the music tailored to wring maximum tension out of each bar. Drum slaps dive-bomb then disappear. Piano codas accentuate the disembodied poetics. Rock may claim to be manifestly unfit for the menacing grip of the day, but Skelethon is indelible, pagan torah to his period of exile and emotional maim. Everything dies. Everyone knows. Don't sweat the hieroglyphics, embalm what you can while you're still alive.
