reax music magazine :: music + culture » Reviews » Astronautalis - Pomegranate

He may not be reinventing the wheel, but we definitely haven't seen any with rims exactly like these before. Jacksonville MC Astronautalis has always approached hip-hop from original angles - he's one of the few to bring backpack's free-associative poetics to the battle stage, and live to tell the tale - but now he's using the genre as the most vague of jumping-off points, and charting an unknown territory all his own. Shades of the anticon. crew and salad-days Beck lightly color his third full-length; so does the influence of such varied storytellers as Tom Waits and G. Love, however, revealing Astronautalis as a postmodern troubador whose sound and stories are both cutting-edge and surprisingly classic. Highlight "Secrets of the Undersea Bell" clangs and stomps like a more melodic update of Rick Rubin's Zeppelin-pillaging Def Jam-era best, while elsewhere the man of the hour croons, snarks, and speed-raps his way though tales and times, calling on everything from folk to Miami bass to old-school English synth-pop to flesh things out. The result is an entertaining, mind-blowing peek into a world where the borders between sounds, styles and ages simply don't exist. - Scott Harrell