It’s not that Aesop Rock is wordy, or that the words he strings together can take a bit of untangling before you can parse them on your own terms — it’s that his abstraction is there to add different angles and new conclusions to the existential questions we all wind up asking at some point. Since Aes is still in that early 20s figuring-shit-out phase in life, Labor Days is heavy with that feeling of youthful ambivalence where one grows to realize their expectations didn’t prepare them for jack shit. So while he seizes every opportunity to turn familiar observations (“I am into hip-hop”) into the stuff of rewind-demanding poetry (from “Labor”: “Tally up the alley cat aggression in this Doug E. Fresh infested/Mess of bassline lust and automatic b-boy Krylon can combust circuit”), all that impressionistic stuff still leaves an impression. Some of that’s down to how both Aes and longtime joined-at-the-hip producer Blockhead already knew how make banging beats out of the intersection of sorrow and tension. That atmosphere is key to emphasizing the emotions that Aes’s lyrical density might otherwise obscure. His disillusionment with the daily grind (the bouncy and sardonically twinkly “9-5’ers Anthem”) feels like the logical endpoint of his disillusionment with trying to connect with the wider world (the woozy, proggy stress-beat of “Flashflood”). His efforts at trying to figure out his own take on human grace in the oft-quoted jazz-folk of “Daylight” are complicated by his knowledge of how much actual work that is in itself (embodied in the world-weary ache of “Battery”). And he’s only at his most unguarded about his idealistic hopes when he channels them through the life story of a woman who lived and died by them (“No Regrets”). But at least “Save Yourself” reveals that he knows enough at this early stage in his career to declare, despite the laments of his underground cohort, that hip-hop itself doesn’t need rescuing as badly as the people who believe in it do.