It’s been a little while since we last heard from Brother Ali. After releasing the fantastic album Us in 2009 and touring extensively in support of it, the Minneapolis emcee made the decision to spend some time with his family and regroup as an artist. Now, with a new album coming up on the horizon, we get our first taste of new Brother Ali music in the form of a free EP, The Bite Marked Heart.

This is the point of the review in which I have to relay my biases up front. Brother Ali is one of my favorite emcees of all time, and his music has helped me through some dark times in my life. For some, this would mean that whatever he did would get a free pass. For me, I’m more like the coach who doesn’t like a sub par effort from his star player, knowing that they are capable of a triple double on any given night. And that’s how I feel about The Bite Marked Heart. If some random emcee I didn’t know submitted this for review, I’d probably think it was decent, but it would get lost in the shuffle. For someone who’s followed his career since he first signed to Rhymesayers, this is the first time I can say that when I listened to the new Brother Ali, I wasn’t immediately excited by music. My biggest problem with the EP is that there’s not much variation within the music. It’s all one stroke, making it more difficult for any one song to really stand out. The majority of production is handled by Jake One, and two more tracks are contributed from Ant, but this isn’t the best work that either has done. All of the songs have slow tempos and don’t work hard to challenge listeners, whether it be bridges, beat drops, counter melodies, or anything of the sort. As an emcee, Brother Ali delivers some great story telling, but there are some moments where it doesn’t quite come together. On the opening track and lead single, “Shine On,” he does a great job of setting up a scene in which the protagonist makes a decision to pretend to be a waiter at a fancy restaurant so that he can talk to a woman sitting by herself, but when the story comes to a climax, the plot comes to a screeching halt as the narrator just says thanks for your time and leaves. I’ve listened to it over and over trying to find some sort of subversion in the story that I missed the first time, but I can’t find it, leaving this listener unsatisfied. “I’ll Be Around” features Phonte, and it just reinforces to me how I don’t like how arrogant and bitter his rhymes have become, which is a shame, because I used to count him amongst my favorites. “Years” is one of the best songs on the EP, while also serving as the most heartbreaking, as he tell the story of an older couple whose relationship is dissolving. The title track that closes the EP is the best marriage of production and rhymes, which features a nice use of a sample of Mayer Hawthorne’s “You’re Not Ready.”

To be clear, this EP isn’t bad. But when you’re track record is as strong as Brother Ali’s, it’s tough to accept a release that’s just decent. He’s delivered some of the most emotionally moving hip hop of the last decade. I know that everything he does isn’t perfect, but when you know an artist is capable of dropping an album that can move a crowd on a really deep level, anything less is going to be a disappointment.