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Aesop Rock is the Ben Marcus of rap. Like the author of Notable American Women and several extremely strange essays for McSweeney’s and The Believer, Aesop Rock (nee Ian Bavitz) tosses words in strange contexts and weird rhythms, twisting their meanings and granting ordinary words power that they lost long ago. Sure, a lot of times you won’t catch his exact point on the first listen–or the twentieth, for that matter. But for Aesop, the environment and feeling that his lyrics impart has always been more important than individual lines. Not that he doesn’t craft stuff you can’t help thinking to yourself at strange points during the days, but it will be more to puzzle out what he means.

His 2003 effort, Bazooka Tooth, was sprawling, messy and unfocused at places; supposedly the exploration of an alter ego (named Bazooka Tooth, natch), the production fuzzed over his lyrics and overlaid them on top of each other. Running at the upper end of the CD’s capacity–over 70 minutes–Aesop’s explorations of the character were mixed with Definitive Jux boasting and the sudden expansion of the city at one minute in time. Though good, as a hip-hop concept album, it couldn’t hold a candle to Mr. Lif’s I, Phantom.

So Fast Cars, clocking in at just over thirty minutes, represents a focus that Aesop Rock hasn’t had in years–it feels like an album squashed into EP length. It’s chock full of goodness, and there’s a lot to like here. The fuzzy lyrics are gone, as well as some of the more avant-garde staccato rhythms that he experimented with on Bazooka Tooth. What’s left is the smooth flow from Labor Days, and a surpringly focused set of songs on militarism, religion and other bugaboos of life in America these days. On “Fast Cars,” the title track, he comments that he’s “live from the ultra-fly sham city bunker where cults multiply alarmingly / Hush little baby, timeout / The black market mockingbirds can sing not a lick but lean to peck your eyes out.” For Aes Rock, terror lies behind every corner of the city; it’s unavoidable. On “Zodiaccupuncture,” he reminds the listener that “the hand cannons won’t ask about your zodiac, boy.”

The production is hit or miss. Aesop Rock splits the production duty with Blockhead, while “Winner Takes All” is produced by Rob Sonic. Half the songs are standard Definitive Jux beats, with heavy bass and Vangelis-style synths in the background evoking a future dystopia here today, and these tracks kind of all run together (though Aesop does vary his flow enough to keep them distinct). But both “Holy Smokes” and “Rickety Rackety” stand out. Blockhead builds “Holy Smokes” around a glockenspiel sample and adding drum beats that vary in intensity as Aesop vents about the Catholic Church sex scandal and the commercialization of religion. “Rickety Rackety” runs on a bouncy bass beat that propels even El-P to throw out a good verse or two. Considering this is Definitive Jux, the fact that you can actually dance to it is mindblowing. “Rickety” is hands down the best song on the album, grabbing that beat and using it to contrast the style of Aesop Rock, El-P and Camu Tao. El-P’s slightly off-rhythm lyrics and Camu Tao’s fast delivery complement the more measured style that Aesop Rock has cultivated throughout the entire album.

The album may be short, but that’s not a bad thing. Aesop Rock takes time to sink into, thanks to the density of his images and weird playing with language. But as an added bonus, the album comes with a booklet of all his lyrics from the past five releases–including Float and theDaylight EP–so that you can finally sit down, and figure out what he says and apply some English major techniques to this stuff. Don’t let his absurdity throw you off–there’s a lot in Aesop Rock’s lyrics, and it’s worth it to sit down with him for some relaxation and some cathartic city terror.

Hey, remember electroclash? That wonderful combination of electronic dance music with punk guitars and sensibility, that powerful weapon of mass distraction? Those international superstars with lasting power, like Fischerspooner and Peaches? Do you remember rocking out on the dance floor, with a Long Island in your hand, to “Emerge” and doing everything you could to forget that (a) 9/11 happened less than a year ago and (b) this particular aesthetic had been done before, back in the 80s, that decade that you were faking nostalgia for?

I don’t, particularly, as I was pretty drunk that entire summer. But for a while there, electroclash (or, y’know, dance-punk, which is what it was) was set up to be the next big thing from NYC. It eventually fizzled out, but not before leaving a bunch of great party albums like Fischerspooner’s #1 (and only), and two out of eight of the 2manyDJs mixes by the guys formerly known as Soulwax. And a couple of singles by James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, aka half of the production group the DFA. Soundsystem caught people’s attention–especially the attention of the

A radical proposition: let’s stop making fun of the French. “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” however clever it might have been at first, is old and played out; that whole “Freedom fries” thing was way overrated as humor and as an insult. Besides, any culture that can throw out anything as good an album as M83’s new Before the Dawn Heals Us clearly has something going for it.

M83 throws everything they’ve got at you: spiraling guitars, percussive drums and weird synthesizers. They switch moods as fast as they switch riffs; going from post-apocalyptic pastoral landscapes to full power–Oh hell, I’m just going to say it: It’s a concept album about nuclear war.

“Fields, Shorelines and Hunters” starts out as a just a simple bass drum beat underneath a few synthesizers, eventually devolving into a burst of static. The weird, NES boss-battle riff that starts out track six (alternatively named by the Atari logo, an asterisk and, on my iTunes, “6.”) disappears almost immediately in a mess of guitars and drums that themselves disappear to a fast paced beat seconds later, then come back underneath some synthesizers that can only be described as “soaring.” And then the next track, “I Guess I’m Floating,” takes all of that away for the sounds of children playing on a school playground and a series of short three-note sequences that provide some constancy over bass that ebbs and flows. And then it’s back into Nintendo level music again.

But it’s later in the album–as it flows into “Teen Angst” and “Safe” and “Let Men Burn Stars”–that the nuclear war thing–okay, maybe I’m reading too much into this–really pops up. “Falling stars exploding on the sea / God it’s beautiful! / The land and the roses slowly disappeared,” sings Anthony Gonzales on “Safe,” and then “A wounded angel is smiling at me,” as the synthesizers swell back up. It makes more sense listening to it than reading a descriptions of it. On “Teen Angst,” he sings “The planet is dying.”

So yeah, there’s an element of cheese-eating: the synthesizers get ridiculous at a couple of points, and the lyrics–especially the female vocals in “Moonchild” and “Car Chase Terror!”–take a little time to grow on you. That “Car Chase Terror!” is supposed to be a dialogue between a mother and daughter fleeing Satan, but are both voiced by the same vocalist, doesn’t make it any easier to understand.

But M83 never lets you get comfortable with just a simple riff unless it’s buried under lots of other stuff. For that reason, it doesn’t have the warmth of Air’s Talkie Walkie, or even the Virgin Suicides soundtrack. That’s not a particular problem, considering that it’s as powerful in its own right, creating a sense of distance in a way that still encourages engaging with the album. It’s the sort of thing that demands to be listened to on huge, good speakers with the lights turned low. It’s an album that should wash over you like an flowing tide or a nuclear blast. M83 understands that there is beauty in destruction, and throws at it you with force.