Verbal Kent - Anesthesia

Pitchfork 60

About two minutes into "Illustrate", Dan Weiss, the Chicago rapper who records as Verbal Kent, raps the following: "Examining the fabric of life, the life scientist/ Put my foot in your ass, it's shitty for podiatrists." The line raises a lot of questions. Given the context, wouldn't it, in fact, be Kent's podiatrist that this was shitty for? Would he go to the podiatrist immediately after administering the ass kicking? Is he going to the podiatrist as a result of the ass kicking? Is he barefoot? Can't he just take a shower?

Yes, this is devoting a little too much thought to a throwaway bar, but it illustrates the most frustrating issue with Anesthesia, Kent's seventh solo record (not counting an excellent 2013 collaboration with Red Pill and Apollo Brown as Ugly Heroes). His rhymes are lean, his delivery is hungry, and he has excellent taste in collaborators—Freddie Gibbs, Torae, and Red Pill all show up here—and producers. He has a knack for lining up consonant syllables and rattling them off in a staccato morse-code delivery that renders every line tense and jagged. But for the most part, Anesthesia is a thicket of non sequiturs, a "Family Guy" pile-up of unrelated images and decontextualized half-puns, free of any organizing structure that might lend them impact or meaning.

Absurdism in hip-hop has its place—in the late '90s, Kool Keith and Ghostface were masters of it, as was Cam'ron circa Purple Haze. The difference is that they were also expert world-builders, so even their stranger asides felt like they were obeying a certain internal logic. Kent's verses just feel like clumsy free-association: In the heavy-lidded "Add Anesthesia", which features sinister music-box production from Kaz 1, Kent says, "One-hitter in the parking lot/ Anne Frank with the discreet smoking/ Hid her in the parking lot." Later in the same song, he offers the even-more-baffling "Huddle up and nurse from the nipple/ Suck on the same tit, so when effects ripple/ It's a simple thing to solve."

Traces of a stronger record turn up throughout Anesthesia, and when Kent manages to follow a train of thought from start to finish, everything suddenly clicks. On the breathless "Suit Case Switch", he trades motor-mouthed verses with Freddie Gibbs, running roughshod over Apollo Brown's beautifully woozy, '70s-soul-quoting production and nicely working a protracted heist metaphor. In the album's latter half, Kent briefly dabbles in autobiography, and the emotional grounding focuses him. In "Notes", he struggles with the news that he's about to become a father and, aside from a nonsensical digression about albacore tuna, it's poignant and striking. And on the soft, soulful "Is This My Life", Kent seems to be alluding to either substance abuse or the 2003 stabbing that almost took his life when he declares, "Recovery's a myth/ Because you don't ever really return/ You just become a new version of the person you were/ And those of us that make it out a little wiser/ Instead of more bitter, get to shine a little brighter."

Those few flashes of earnestness and coherence suggest the album Anesthesia might have been. Its title, along with a few pointed, passing references to self-medication, imply that Kent had some desire to explore the ways people choose to numb themselves. But none of those ideas are ever fleshed out; instead, Kent keeps falling back on stuff like, "Teach and grade my own masters' thesis/ Hot chili pepper temper, Flea pleading with Anthony Kiedis." The line makes a kind of sense, inasmuch as both Flea and Anthony Kiedis are in a band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Otherwise, like so much of Anesthesia, it's about as resonant as a Wikipedia entry.