Bad Time Zoo

Was 2004 really that long ago? Sims, of the perpetually bubbling-up Doomtree crew, recorded a lovely, blithely corny EP track a couple years back, “TC AG,” that sentimentalized the mid-’00s Minneapolis rap underground as if it were a lost era, fixing a gaze on a napkin drawing scribbled by Snakebird one late night at the Dinkytowner, now framed and hanging on Sims’ wall.

If you get either of these references (the Rhymesayers designer who left town, the local club that closed), there’s a very good chance you’ve been along for the ride over the past half-decade, cheering Sims as his promise grows. He has a deliciously husky, endearingly nasal rasp of a voice that’s crisp and exact, so his rhymes snap even without punch lines. His political science, on this second proper album, is leftist, but in a way that tries to describe the world from scratch, as if approaching capitalist anomie for the first time ever.

His beat maker here, Lazerbeak, loves soul-fried futurist funkscapes that give way under your feet, with “Weight” striking the perfect catchy balance between sensibilities, seductively framing cynicism as a burden. Which it is, really: Sims is so buoyantly idealistic, on tracks like the baritone-sax-rocking “Burn It Down” (“Less emotion, more emulsion!”), you might feel bad even pondering the cop-out dismissal of “corny.” (See the second line of this review.) The only false note of the gorgeous “Too Much”—the closest thing here to rap, as most kids consume it, is Sims’ supposedly grizzled disposition.

So why can’t he light the rest of this thing on fire? The damper on Bad Time Zoo isn’t just preachiness, though shaming NPR-listening co-op shoppers for not helping their neighbors (on “One Dimensional Man”) feels culturally specific to the point of masochism. Sims’ problem is tonal: Opening with what sounds like a South African choir sample over a descending minor-key synthesizer bass line, “Future Shock” overdoses on significance even before Sims invokes the first-person plural (“So close we could almost touch, but so far we don’t speak on the bus”). “We” need more Sims and more Simses; we just need more fun too.

Sims plays a release show for Bad Time Zoo at the Fine Line Music Cafe on Saturday, Feb. 19.