the reckoning:

[September 24th, 2003] AESOP ROCK
Bazooka Tooth
(Definitive Jux)

Bazooka Tooth finds underground heavyweight Aesop Rock taking the mirror he held up to gritty New York in 2001's Labor Days and smashing it into a thousand shards. The result is fragmented imagery of his city, shot off at a near-incomprehensible four words per second. You get the sense that he is condensing volumes of journals, mythology, Frank Miller comics and scattered sidewalk scraps from urban prophets into a 70-minute album. "NY Electric" is a rapid-fire post-9/11 caterwaul: "My gills call the East River rock bottom home/ See New York as ancient Rome." Aesop creates sci-fi dystopias, ignoring hip-hop's prevailing ultra-literalism and pushing the listener's imagination into biting abstraction. The aural backdrop is as dense as the lyrics, probably because Aesop produced 11 of the 15 tracks himself. Schooled in Def Jux founder El-P's apocalypse-meets-A-train aesthetic, the Brooklyn native creates a stew of weighty beats, strings, layered loops and scratches. All of this works to shrink the walls on the listener and guide the ears to the calling card of his wordsmith wizardry.