At the end of 2012’s Skelethon, Aesop Rock (Aes) launched into an intensely angry tirade in which he laid his feelings bare for all to see. Hearing a man so well known for his verbal trickery and jovial nature be so direct as to say “I have been a bastard to the people who have actively attempted to deliver me from peril” was a very strange experience.

Fortunately, recognising all of his own perceived problems seemed to bring back his joyful nature, teaming up with Kimya Dawson as the delightfully quirky The Uncluded in 2013 and later recording the braggadocios album Bestiary with Rob Sonic, all while retaining a humorous internet presence. We were no longer worried about Aes and expected his new album The Impossible Kid to be perfectly fine; an expectation that the album achieves, but the lack of the dark edge held by his previous work prevents it from being brilliant.

As the title might suggest, The Impossible Kid spends a good part of its duration with Aes examining specific events from his childhood, using his typical brand of multi-layered metaphors. On the song ‘Rings’ we hear him rifling off lyrics at great speed about how he is saddened by the fact that he neglected his visual artistic skills in order to hone his rapping ability; on ‘Kirby’ he describes the exploits of his pet cat; and on ‘Blood Sandwich’ he tells two rather strange stories about his brothers. The nostalgic mood that Aes is in doesn’t specifically lend itself to positive or negative feelings; he is merely a raconteur at this point as we hear him pleasantly ramble about the first thoughts that pop into his head.

The nostalgic feelings continue on the production choices. Skelethon was the first album that Aes produced by himself and the beats felt progressive and moody, with a distinctly 90s flair to them. The aforementioned ‘Blood Sandwich’  has a chorus with retro sampling techniques pulled straight out of 1995. That said, he still has a progressive flair; the track ‘Mystery Fish’ sounds like the reworking of a Bomb Squad beat with updated synths and more advanced layering techniques. Despite every song being great to listen to on its own, the production style does not vary across The Impossible Kid which sadly leads the songs to blur into one. It’s one thing for an album to not feel hugely cohesive, quite another to have these randomly arranged songs lack an identity.

And it is from here that all of the album’s problems stem: I like The Impossible Kid a great deal but I don’t think the tracks set themselves apart as they did on Skelethon. My earlier claim that the album lacks a dark edge rings untrue as yet again we have a closer with paranoid, brutally self deprecating lyrics, but it goes unnoticed because for me, the beat did not make me want to listen up. It was too similar to all that had gone before.

Although Aes consistently tells good stories in an interesting way, The Impossible Kid was missing the emotional aspect that had intrigued on his previous albums. This might come from the more explicitly narrative form that the album takes, but I like to think that this tactic of spinning yarns would have worked far better if Aes had been willing to take more risks with the production. I would like to see him continue this lyrical style in the future, and I still took great joy in trying to work out exactly what he was talking about when I read the lyrics back – but much as I like The Impossible Kid, it feels like a distinct step down from his previous efforts.