Review Summary: Like a plumber in a leotard, or like you have a wasp in your underwear.
Although they don't occupy anything resembling the same niches, Aesop Rock and Tom Waits are kindred spirits in a sense. Both use the tools at their disposal in abstract and unusual ways, often leaving a listener scratching their head rather than bobbing it. Tom Waits' musical output, stretched over the course of over four decades, has used every sound from regular old rock and roll to cabaret and jazz, and his best work has always had a manic marionette theatre sound to it. Aesop Rock, meanwhile, seems to have a spurious relationship with the English language, speaking in pictures rather than discrete sentences that even a page of lyrics won't necessarily help with. So what happens when these two artists are put together?
The answer: Magic.
Opener Reeperlawn sets the tone for the album as a whole. Using a tweaked and twisted backing track from Waits' Reeperbahn (yes, every song title does tell you what two songs are used), Ace Rock's deep baritone voice dances over top so deftly it's like it was meant to be there. Naturally, it's the Waits half of the equation that receives the most alteration, drum loops added to his tracks, culled from various albums rather than a single 1:1 mashup a la The Grey Album, while Aesop's vocal lines are used largely unaltered. This is for the best, as his lyrics are knotted and dense enough without being chopped and shuffled in any way.
From there, the album proceeds as you'd expect. For the most part, the beats are built on Waits' more sparse and minimal compositions, for obvious reasons, always to great effect. Somewhat surprisingly, Waits' vocals do pop up now and again, the gravelly barks providing a stark counterpoint to Aesop's smoother rhyming on Undercomb Kids and the ethereal singing in Dirt City sounding downright haunting.
The album is, of course, not perfect. Getaway Rain and Shore Thieves use so much of added drum loops that the magic of Aesop Waits is rather lost, leaving the pair of songs sounding just like a remix of the originals off of None Shall Pass. Additionally, once your ears have gotten used to the "gimmick" of the album, some of the later songs can sound rather same-y in that the drunken stomp of Singapore Harbor is Yours and Dark Heart of Istanbul don't sound markedly different from the aforementioned Reeperlawn. That's an unfair criticism, in a sense, because most great albums have an identity, a particular sound they're going for, but a listener hoping to buckle in for a roller coaster of multi-varied instrumentals might be left feeling a bit cold.
Most peculiarly, the album ends on an instrumental. It's still remixed, but has no vocals atop it, which is an odd choice on an album which is half celebrating one of hip hop's most respected wordsmiths, but as a closer it functions well as a denouement for a whirlwind of an album that can be almost exhausting as your brain attempts to soak in everything it's been bombarded with.
If you're a fan of either half of Aesop Waits, you absolutely owe it to yourself to check out Tom Shall Pass. It's hard to believe that there is a way to make Aesop Rock or Tom Waits even more "out there", but this accomplishes it. It's good enough that we can only hope they perform this live someday.
