It's obvious from his debut, x2, that underground producer/rapper
TES has a lot of ideas, but it's also quite clear that he can't quite organize them into intriguing experiments or well-wrought songs. Though he's not nearly as successful,
TES most often tends toward the fractured charm of the
Lootpack crew or the digital paranoia of Def Jux, with much of the sonic imagination apparent on records by his Lex labelmate
Boom Bip. Vintage horrorcore rap appears to be a big influence, as several of the tracks feature
TES' hazy, nightmarish raps harnessed to dark, repetitive samples. A pair of tracks, "My Receiver" and "Big Shots," are worthy of grabbing for a mix of basement-level rap, but for every solid production, there's a track like "New New York," an astonishingly misguided fusion of obscurist rap and commercial-slanted production. ~ John Bush