Pitchfork

More than 12 years after he emoted all over the first verse on the first track on the first Wu-Tang Clan album, the now 35-year-old Ghostface Killah is still starving for respect, understanding, and acceptance. Hypnotically restless, the East Coast purist has homed in on a rap palette full of vivid hurt and strafing alarm-- and bursting forth with some of the most potent yarns, barbs, and production of his remarkably consistent career, Fishscale is the choice outcome of a creative mind using experience as a compass en route to triumph.

Though Ghostface's veteran status informs much of his fifth solo album, his father-knows-best pose is led by breathless rhymes, not nostalgia. To wit, "Whip You With a Strap" rails against the lack of consequences brought upon today's youth with a smooth cleverness, while "Big Girl" moans about three fast-living women wasting their potential on cocaine mounds. Tellingly, it's Ghost's own coke the girls can't stop sniffing. Such ambiguities eschew didacticism for a lived-in wisdom that's as wicked as it is worthwhile.

Ghost's godfather-cause is most noticeably directed at ostentatious modern-day rap hustlers who largely cook up tales with broad lines and no consequences, as he devotes several of Fishscale's 18 songs to the booming drug-rap subgenre he helped launch in 1995 with Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.... On both "R.A.G.U." and "Kilo", Rae turns up to assist his close friend, describing the perils of the drug trade. Hardly akin to the dealer-as-infallible-ghetto-champion guise currently purported by the likes of Young Jeezy, Fishscale's dope peddlers are harried and frayed. Between broken wrists, familial strife, and self-inflicted gunshots to the groin, "R.A.G.U." is anything but glorifying toward its stressed-out, drug-running protagonists.

But the album's most vivid illicit spectacle belongs to Ghost alone; "Shakey Dog" takes the rapper's penchant for eye-popping lyrical imagery to its extreme, offering a twisty Mamet-style narrative about a botched two-man robbery attempt. "Fasten your seatbelts," warns the Staten Island son before unraveling a scene so perfectly lucid that an accompanying video would be redundant. Whether describing the alluring smells coming from his victim's apartment or the ruthless history of an ancillary old lady ("She paid her dues when she smoked her brother-in-law at her boss' wedding") he passes on his way up to the place, Ghost touches on myriad senses and memories-- it's the kind of song that requires several close listens to understand at all. It also strongly suggests that, if Ghost ever loses his appetite for rap, he might find success as a screenwriter.

As the album's other specific tragedies-- shitty haircuts, bus stop infatuation gone awry-- fly by with deft everyman flourishes, it's the surreal "Underwater", with its strange spirituality, that proves most trenchant. The dreamy account finds our hero playing out a possible afterlife allegory while swimming at the bottom of the ocean. "I'm not on my turf," he confesses as mermaids "with Halle Berry haircuts" offer guidance along the way. In the tourist role, Ghost is as compelling as when he's recounting pavement-bred stories of his familiar youth. Sometimes on "Underwater", the two come together brilliantly like when he notices "SpongeBob in a Bentely coup, bangin' the Isleys." Eventually arriving at the "world's banginest mosque," Ghost finds comfort in Muslim chants; the rapper's rare moment of peace is well-deserved amidst Fishscale's enthralling agony. Aiding in the track's calming vibes is a mysterious, flute-laden beat courtesy of MF Doom, who's responsible for four beats on the record. The masked supervillain is in the company of a reputable bevy of soul-stacked sample-masters on Fishscale and their musical backdrops match Ghost's focus and vision.

In an interview with RZA last year, he told me, "Listen to how Ghost sounds rappin' over one of my beats and then over another beat... he sounds like a grown man [on my beat] and he sound younger on [other] producers' beats because they don't know the frequency." But, as the first solo Ghost disc without a RZA production, Fishscale attests he was wrong. Whether it's the late Dilla providing his off-kilter vinyl-hiss haze for "Strap", Pete Rock cutting up Sly Stone's "Family Affair" on the hollow funk of posse cut "Dogs of War", or Just Blaze doing his Banger 101 thing on "The Champ" (which, stripped of its bootleg Rocky samples at the last minute thanks to copyright issues, still packs heat), each producer takes his opportunity to envelop today's most soulful rapper with deep swaths of vintage samples and deep drums. The RZA's sonic influence remains strong-- and he even shows up briefly on the excellent Wu reunion cut "9 Milli Bros"-- but his absence behind the Fishscale boards is largely inconsequential.

Considering Ghost's continued status as one of hip-hop's most revered, relevant elder statesmen, it seems odd that his name was seldom bandied about in most of the last decade's King of New York debates. Fishscale reiterates with cinematic verve that the most vital current Wu Tang Clan member's storytelling can match Biggie's in both excitement and humor. Yet Ghost's songs are unrelenting in their slavishness to density and credibility, and that can turn off casual listeners even as it intoxicates hip-hop purists. "My arts is crafty darts, why y'all stuck with 'Laffy Taffy'?" he asks with utter sincerity on "The Champ". As long as inevitable questions like that continually re-up this heavyweight's unswerving drive, they're probably better left unanswered.