With This Rock

Aesop Rock draws a line in the sand with None Shall Pass.

by Drew Lazor

Flash that buttery gold. Jittery zeitgeist. Wither by the watering hole. What a patrol. What are we to heart huckabee art fuckery suddenly? Not enough young in his lung for the waterwings?

SOME SHALL PASS: Aesop Rock's latest CD boasts guest appearances Def Jux labelmates El-P, Rob Sonic and Cage, as well as John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Digesting a paper version of Aesop Rock's lyrics is like flipping to a random section of Ulysses and attempting to pick up on the action midsentence. You know the source is more than credible. You know the material is substantive. But fuck if you know what's going on.

Hit play, though, and any lost-in-translation anxiety twitters away: The lauded Long Island-born MC's sneering, chasmic delivery chews benign syllables into spitballs, making quick work of any notions you might have regarding man's ability to fuss with words until they pop off the page like swollen tires. Take the passage above, the vigorous opening bars of "None Shall Pass," the title track of Rock's first full-length album since 2003's Bazooka Tooth. Plucked from the proper context, it could be mistaken for fragmented beat poetry. Let the man speak over a track, though, and it becomes clear that he's got poetry beat.

For a guy who dabs Scripps Spelling Bee adjectives from his brow when he perspires, the MC doesn't have much to say when asked to compare None Shall Pass with the past two full-lengths he's put out on El-P's Definitive Jux label. Released in 2001, Labor Days is an unshakable indie rap benchmark; Bazooka Tooth bathed listeners in the blippy furor of life on the grid. While devotees clamor to nail down their own referential mile markers for the record, Rock — who kicks off a massive North American tour Sept. 8 at the Starlight Ballroom — feels that such an attitude overlooks his willingness to take risks. "I understand why people do it; they need a tangible description," says Rock (née Ian Bavitz), whose on-wax presence is so distinct that hearing his normal speaking voice feels like it should be accompanied by some sort of man-behind-the-curtain revelation. "But to be fair, it doesn't sound like either [album]. I always feel like I'm trying to step somewhere new, and whether I do it or don't do it, the effort is there."

Rock is right in noting the record's singularity — from the outset, it's clear that something markedly different's brewing. One of the biggest reasons for the shift, he says, was his burgeoning disdain for the M.O. that's served him well up to this point in his career.

"A lot of people write lyrics that they're comfortable with," says the rapper of the topics he's dubbed his "safety zones." For him, they include "any sort of 'I'm better than you at rapping' material, and any type of post-9/11, paranoia type of stuff. That's always going to ring true and be involved in what I do, but there was a way to make it more of a filter than a topic ... I wanted to take a third-person point of view, even stuff that draws from autobiographical times."

As promised, flashes of remembrance tint None Shall Pass — but, in classic form, the MC frames them in a way that's as unearthly as it is challenging. That "everyone was in high school at one point" is his rationale for creating "Catacomb Kids," a morbidly addictive coming-of-age blarer that's one of the five tracks on the album he produced himself. Rock peers at adolescence through a gothic kaleidoscope, recounting the travails of growing up over a liquefied bass line ("No concept of the problem/ We responded like a snow day/ And would clobber shit to flotsam till the cop said it was OK"). The new jack horns that dot the beginning of "Five Fingers" melt into an examination of kleptomania. El-P and Def Jux labelmates Rob Sonic and Cage pop up on the record, but its most unexpected — and inspired — teaming comes in the form of "Coffee," Rock's crowd-pleasing appointment with Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle.

"At some point, I just grew tired of talking about myself," Rock readily admits when breaking down the reasoning behind the redefined approach attached to None Shall Pass. "Everything felt like it was preaching. I always hated listening to music that was pushing ideas on me, [but I realized] that's kind of what I do."

On its face, tossing out the soap box in favor of becoming an outside-the-punchlines observer seems like a retroactive move, one that, on a basic level, harkens back to the storytelling pedigree that's always colored New York hip-hop. But Rock sees it differently: It's a thrust forward, a calculated effort to distance himself from what's always worked. "When I became conscious of it, I found it easy to avoid," says Rock, who also took a geographical plunge by ditching the tri-state for San Francisco two years ago. "I found myself on this new page, and it was actually refreshing to not have to go back to these constants."

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)

Aesop Rock will perform Sat., Sept. 8, 7 p.m., $16, with Cage, Blockhead and DJ Signify, Starlight Ballroom, 460 N. Ninth St., 215-769-1530, www.r5productions.com.