Album Review: Black Hole Superette by Aesop Rock

Photo by Aman Pal on Unsplash

It is a grand time to be an Aesop Rock fan, with the release of his fourth album in five years, Black Hole Superette. It fits beautifully in the trend his last three solo efforts have established in that it’s equal parts a left-field concept album and lyrically dense oldschool-ish hip hop. Admittedly I have a little trouble keeping up with the sheer lyrical density present in the record, which is nothing new for Aes, so I may have missed some metaphors. A whopping 18 tracks makes for just a hair over an hour of listening with features ranging from NYC hip hop duo Armand Hammer (Billy Wood and Elucid) to indie multi-instrumentalist Hanni El Khatib. It’s a long haul, not that that’s a bad thing.

The album opens with a low, bit-crushed beat and initially rapid verbiage before becoming slower and more deliberate, swinging between ethereal songs about graffiti like Secret Knock and Checkers, a deeply verbose lead single set to a very old school sort of beat uncharacteristically lauding himself as the unique artist that he is. Movie Night continues the grand Aesop Rock tradition of songs about his pets and neighborhood, specifically his blue-eyed mixed breed dog, a “five-in-one good boy”. EWR — Terminal A, Gate 20 is another song seemingly about graffiti and Aes’ love for the art. The backing track does manage to overpower the lyrics at times, which makes it difficult to catch everything being said. 1010WINS, a track named after and featuring samples from ID bumpers from a New York City AM news station, is a much slower, more deliberate affair, and very east coast in terms of vibe. This transitions to So Be It, which features Open Mike Eagle’s dreamy voice on the bridges, leading to an overall summery, chill feeling.

Send Help ended up taking a couple of listens for me to really get. It’s a very slow-paced song, which at first blush seems to be both a song about Aes’s anxieties regarding getting help from others, complete with what may be a reference to his own tendency towards verbosity (“purple prose when you’re looking for just the facts”) and that he’s realized that it’s okay to ask for help. John Something follows this with a tale of an assembly where an artist gave a lecture and spoke on a documentary he’d recently seen while showing off his art. This memory has stuck with Aes all these years despite his inability to remember the man’s name, thus the name of the song. Ice Sold Here features a beat vaguely reminiscent of some long-forgotten game soundtrack and is about how Aes is, in fact, too cold, metaphorically or otherwise.

Costco features a very listenable, MF DOOM-esque beat. Aes is very much feeling isolated and lonely, and laments that in this song, and admits that his status as a loner is largely his own doing. This gives way to Bird School, a song about birds, stage magic, and how Aes is very much in his own lane in how he does things. Snail Zero is a boom bap-styled autobiographical tale of a snail ending up in a housewarming gift for his girlfriend in the form of a fish tank, much to Aes’s surprise. The snail, being a self-producing hermaphrodite, ends up multiplying like wildfire. Aes debates removing the snails or allowing them to coexist in the tank with the fish despite knowing they’ll eventually take over.

Charlie Horse is a necessarily long track to allow for a proper feature from the two guests features, Homeboy Sandman and Lupe Fiasco, and an exercise in a Goldilocks sort of problem in terms of mastering. The beat manages to overpower Aes at times, be overpowered by Homeboy Sandman, and hit the perfect balance with Lupe Fiasco. Steel Wool features a solo banjo as an opener before transitioning to a slow beat mated to rapid lyrics, at times feeling like a mismatch. In the song, Aes is longing for the past, with the hook “used to pair cereal with cartoons / I don’t know if there’s a better way / now I’m going hungry in the war room / it’s similar but it is not the same.”

Black Plums features a very subdued beat backed with Tears for Fears-esque 80s synths for an altogether calm feeling song about enjoying big, ripe plums, the simple things, stopping to smell the roses, and the transient nature of life. The Red Phone goes for a darker, very NYC-styled beat, with a chorus/bridge sung in low harmony instead of spoken. Himalayan Yak Chew is another introspective number, simultaneously listing Aes’ faults and merits, and dedicated to the fact that he’s only human. He acknowledges that yes, he’s weird, but he makes weird work, and he’s happy that way. The album ends with Unbelievable Shenanigans, very much another song about memories and getting older, with Hanni El Khatib lamenting “memory / standing on the edge of the moon / staring at a world I’ll be leaving soon.”

All told, listening to the lyrics, Aesop Rock may be starting to feel his age a little bit, which no one can blame him for at just a few days shy of 49. That being said, he’s still kicking, and this album is proof. Overall score of .860 out of 1.000.