Rapper, spoken-word artist, producer and founding Anti-Pop Consortium member Beans hasn’t released an LP since 2011’s End It All. Now come three albums and a first novel, Die Tonight, in a limited-edition bundle. The wait was worth it. HAAST, Love Me Tonight and Wolves Of The World each showcase various aspects of Beans’ formidably wide-ranging aesthetic—the brainy gearhead, the gritty sexhead, the spacey funkhead. The division isn’t that easy or clean, of course, as Beans’ rapid-fire lyrical delivery and diverse topicality don’t linger too long in any one idiom, and all three are linked by his minimalist production approach and tendency to blend canonical hip-hop gestures with artful rhetorical flourishes (from the sinfully catchy “Pendulum”: “And we walk around humble, for what?/Y’all already know the name before we tear the shit up”). Wolves inches the other two albums just slightly, in its complexity of form and content. But each is a stunner on its own merits, and taken entire, the trilogy (triptych?) presents one of so-called underground hip hop’s strongest talents in top form.
—Eric Waggoner
