Busdriver recently figured that underground hip hop happened ten years ago. And that well may be true. There’s now less of a distinction between platinum acts and local emcees just getting a start. And before this devolves into another screed on how the internet affects the music industry, it should be noted that Sleep and Oldominion, a Northwest crew that includes too many members to calculate, existed prior to all this digital nonsense. While that crew hasn’t had their name spread far and wide, Sleep’s third full length might work to right that wrong – if enough folks get a chance to take a listen.

The album’s cover might owe as much to metal as hip hop with a skull looming over a brooding child’s head, it doesn’t seem that what’s inside is supposed to be some boom bap. But it is. The fact that the disc is being released through Strange Famous, a label helmed by Sage Francis, might work to explain the disc’s presentation, but maybe Sleep is really just a Slayer fan – or whoever that guitar is from on “Commercial.” Regardless, though, Hesitation Wounds, while coming from a scene veteran, sounds tied to Seattle’s more recent up cropping of scene stalwarts – Blue Scholars, Gabriel Teodros, etc.

It might not be the most cohesive sound, Seattle does have a surprisingly healthy hip hop scene and Sleep’s rapping comes in a far sight darker than most of the other NW regulars. Again, though, that was probably at least part of the draw Sage Francis felt when encountering Oldominion back in 2001. Apparently, the two emcees struck up a friendly conversation with Francis eventually lending his imprint as the auspices for Hesitation Wounds. And wiith lines that include references to “a thousand lashes,” from “Get It,” the lyrical focus of this disc is largely concerted on introspective couplets. Sleep wonders what he can do if presented with the right situations – pretty similar to Francis’ self-pity party stuff from his early discs.

As Hesitation Wounds moves towards its natural conclusion, Sleep levies a ‘personal journal’ style rap on listeners. It’s an historical look at how he came up and again finds the rapper struggling with motivation while the song eventually validates the emcee’s life choices. It might be self-aggrandizing, but the story that “So Far” explains is one that occurs in every city in the country. Each of these different locales might conclude differently, but at least here, this emcee shows that there can be success at the end.

Sleep’s disc probably isn’t going to end up creating a huge, new mass of fans, but the label that he’s working with currently won’t hurt too much. But what this amounts to is a variation on what Sage Francis has been working on for the last decade or so. Hesitation Wounds certainly isn’t a retread, it’s just pretty closely related to a good amount of what’s out there already. And even if the production, for the most part, is pretty buoyant, the disc ends up being just an average listen – even if Del makes a quick appearance.