Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass

Trading the kind of erratic beats that only one man going ballistic on his pots and pans can muster for jazzy loops and lashings of dirty bass-smothered funk, the pissed off Aesop Rock who sprayed his words like bullets of rage on 2003's Bazooka Tooth rests easy while Ian Bavitz returns us to mellower times on None Shall Pass. If Labor Days was Aesop's sounding board for the everyday plights of the working masses and Bazooka Tooth an opportunity to let off some steam about his own tribulations, None Shall Pass marks a strong refinement in his palette and a coming of age pervades. "If you never had a day that a snow cone couldn't fix..." he poses on the title track, alluding toward the occasional need to look at his world of dextrous retrospective narrative from a child's perspective between the feistier, adult-oriented numbers from this entirely satisfying set.