It was just last September when we saw Bay Area emcee Azeem team up with the German production duo known as Ancient Astronauts to release the album Broken Puppets. Now, just a few months later, Azeem pairs up with one of the two producers, KABANJAK, to release a different type of album in Vision Teller.

While Broken Puppets was a little more typical in terms of what you’d expect out of these underground hip hop artists, Vision Teller is slightly different in his approach. While Azeem can rock the crowd and spit some entertaining rhymes, there is another side of the artist, one that gets closer to his spoken word/poetry background, one that was on display way back when, when he was recording with Variable Unit. What this means in practical terms is that this isn’t your typical hip hop album, but instead more of a hip hop update to the type of spoken word/music albums that artists like Gil Scott-Heron and Last Poets used to make. KABANJAK does a great job of delivering these abstract, psychedelic electronic beats that are more meditative than funky, which is the perfect background for Azeem’s poetry. He has a great low voice with just a little rasp to it, which resonates nicely on the mic as he strolls through his poems with a charismatic cadence. He knows when to accentuate certain words and phrases to make a point, and he knows when to keep things flowing and let the listener get lost in how the words unfold. It can get abstract and philosophical as Azeem ponders big topics like religion and the universe, or it can get very timely and specific as he discusses issues like race and police brutality. Azeem is an intelligent and thoughtful artist, and he knows how to give time to a wide range of topics and connect them all together.

Vision Teller isn’t the Azeem project that will get the party going, but there are plenty of other albums in his catalogue for that. This album is one that you’ll want to listen to one on one, as you connect and develop a personal relationship with some beautiful poetry and meditative beats.