ASTRONAUTALIS
Pomegranate
(Eyeball Records)
1/2
Two minutes into Pomegranate, and a baby’s already dead.
Seattle rapper Astronautalis opens his third album with a gravelly,
singsong murder yarn—like Edward Gorey tackling The Great
Gatsby—while a live band contorts the burlesque,
string-and-piano dirges of Nick Cave into a guitar-driven hiphop track.
It’s a bewildering collision, this catchy hiphop that converts a
symphony of instruments into shameless, poppy hooks, and these strange
stories rumbling under the dust of a history-obsessed bookstore.
But Astro’s killin’ it here. The former battle-rapper and
Jacksonville, Florida, native has spent the past few years refining his
musical perspective, and here he reaches a new rap-rock pinnacle, more
aggressive and poppy than Why? yet darker and deeper than the Beastie
Boys. Astronautalis’s voice is the secret—deep and drawl-tinged,
capably switching from Aesop Rock–ian speed-flow to prolonged
singing passages often and seamlessly. There’s nothing nasal or timid
about this white boy, and even while shout-singing about drowning
divers on “Secrets of the Undersea Bell,” he still has a rapper’s
emphasis on flow: “The sea swelled like the ribcage of lions
breathing/They pulled till you swore that the rope was bleeding/Ichor
poured from the palms of gods and heathens.”
Storytelling about the Opium Wars and courtroom sagas allows Astro
to both flex his lyrical muscles and let loose on anthemic
shouters—quite a few here, none better than “Trouble Hunters,” a
rumination on Southern pride that recalls “The Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down” as a wild fist-pumper. But Astro can’t help pointing the
light back at himself and shining on the beautiful hidden track, which
closes the album, fittingly, with rebirth: “She gave birth to my only
son, a smokin’ gun, blue-eyed, block chip/On the first warm day to end
the ice age, frostbit.”