4 out of 5

Label: Rhymesayers

Produced by: Aesop Rock, Various

I love this era of indie hip hop. My ears have consumed enough of the genre to really say this, but before digital made the tools and tweaks that much more accessible, a lot of hip-hop within each scene pulled from similar templates, making A. the differences between certain produces maybe more slight but also more apparent and impactful (like the scale of difference was smaller, making the way it hit weightier), and B. what each emcee brought to the mic impactful as well, as you’d be rhyming over sparser beats and unable to hide behind a lot of glitz. The indie / backpack scene latched on to a boom-bap beat with reverbed vocals and often some kind of single sample – keys, strings, whatever – which is where you saw folks like Ant making a name for themselves by gearing that boom-bap towards soul.

Aesop’s production is often a highlight when he produces someone else’s work, and though the post-kinda-retirement years (post The Impossible Kid) has seen Rock turning towards a more crowded, digital style, the denseness and slow-roll rhythm of his works still impresses. But before that point, maybe prior to Skelethon, his beats / production was a lot closer to that backpack vibe, and yet still showing off his sense of quirk: downbeat funk; some intense strings; or, when teamed up with Blockhead, some pepped up BPMs and oddball affectations. Appleseed, musically, is one of my favorite of the early-early Aes stuff, in part because it’s shorter – more on that in a moment – but also because it’s just so deep on the boom-bap sound that it really emphasizes what I’m saying above: the spice Aes adds to that goes a long way, and each track gets to be distinct. And compared to Float, his persona is still forming – he’s still having fun.

Appleseed does suffer from the downside of this era, and of Float, though, which is that he says a lot without saying very much, and / or the rhymes are so winding that it’s hard to abstract meaning from them. At full length, this can be pretty tiresome, and also on Float you can hear the stirrings of a more serious / introspective persona, which sucked some of that fun out. I don’t know what Rock is saying on 95% of Appleseed, but nonetheless, the vibe is a bit goofier; a bit more playful. It breathes more. Despite all the wordsmithing, Aes was never super showy – definitely part of his appeal – and that gets enhanced by Appleseed’s shoot-from-the-hip style. (Where shooting from the hip for Aes means never repeating a word, and always spitting right on time…)

As far as I know, the reissue wasn’t touched up at all, but man, it sounds phenomenal. Maybe mixed a bit too heavy on the bass (I had to fiddle with settings to not blow out my ear drums), but the old school flair has analog richness with the crispness of a modern release. Otherwise, I think only the artwork – and this no longer being on a CDr! – has changed.