The Automator: A Much Better Tomorrow

As the Pachelbel-sampling "I Got To Tell You" demonstrates, the Automator can lay down a worthwhile instrumental when he wants to; "Sleep" and "The Truth" emulate the head-nodding soundscapes of his Frisco compatriot and sometime collaborator DJ Shadow. Unlike Shadow, though, the Automator is fundamentally a producer of backing tracks, a role to which he wisely sticks for most of the album. "Cartoon Capers" is classic Kool Keith, a frenzied stream of Saturday-morning references hooked around a repeated declaration that "I know his boys/And look, they down with Skeletor." Me too, man, me too.

The standout, though, is "It's Over Now," in which Keith drops his usual mad-scientist role to deliver an autobiographical, struggling-MC tale: "I open mailboxes, all I see was more bills/Gettin' cold chicken, walkin' down Bronx hills" over a suitably desolate backing track. It isn't what we've come to expect from rap's reigning madman, but Keith pulls it off without descending into genre cliches. Unfortunately, clichéd is the only way to describe "Buck Buck" and "Willing," in which guests Poet and Neph the Madman add absolutely nothing to hip-hop's tired book of gunfight stories. The Automator himself has a few weak ones as well—"I Want Da Mic" is disposable Wu-lite complete with dialogue samples, and many of the instrumentals lack the momentum which keeps, say, DJ Shadow's work consistently interesting. Still, the beats are uniformly tight, and Kool Keith's rhymes are characteristically stellar, making A Much Better Tomorrow a satisfying if not revelatory listen for fans of left-of-center hip-hop. (75Ark)

—Nicholas Webb

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