Another week has dawned, and with it comes a new mashup album to help while away those long, lonely hours of bleary-eyed, post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas ennui. An enterprising DJ identified only as Aesop Waits has made available through Bandcamp a 12-track compilation entitled Tom Shall Pass, which melds the reference-heavy rhymes of esoteric alternative rapper Aesop Rock (complete with shout outs to R. Crumb and the Garbage Pail Kids) with the gnarled, growly music of bohemian blues-jazz-folk poet Tom Waits. In hindsight, the shotgun wedding of Waits and Rock is not as unexpected as it may initially appear. These two men, though born 27 years apart and on opposite coasts, are brothers of a common fraternity of acceptably hip, just-outside-the-mainstream artists beloved by those who pride themselves on listening to music which is quirky without being cute and experimental without being unlistenable. The only possible hitch in splicing the DNA of Aesop Rock and Tom Waits is that the latter’s lurching, wobbly music is not particularly hip-hop-friendly or drum-loop-compatible. This problem has been neatly solved on Tom Shall Pass by letting Aesop Rock control the tempo of the music with his motormouth flow, while Waits more or less stumbles around in the background, glowering with inscrutable menace.


[via Metafilter]