“Cherrywine” is the new identity of Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, who was a crucial part of the short-lived, highly influential rap trio known as Digable Planets. The group’s laid-back blend of coffee-shop poetry and syncopated jazz rhythms was the perfect counterstrike to early-‘90s gangsta rap. But much like positive-minded contemporaries Arrested Development, the Planets scored a Top Ten hit and a Grammy, and then abruptly imploded after their second album didn’t sell. Sadly, Digable Planets’ sophomore effort, 1994’s Blowout Comb, is one of the best hip-hop LPs of all time, full of warm, undulating rhythms and lyrics delivered with funky finesse. Butler’s latest incarnation finds him trying to morph the spirit of his former group with the modern sounds of producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, and the result is fairly dreadful. Bright Black oozes with irrelevance, from the empty, pointless mumbling of “See For Miles” to the blatant Outkast rip-off “American Drip.” While with Digable Planets, Butler had the luxury of playing off of another talented MC, Ladybug, whose smoothly delivered rhymes and refreshing female perspective warranted the most lyrical attention. Here, there are no partners or special guests, and it is made clear that Cherrywine doesn’t have what it takes to carry an entire record all by himself. His voice is lackluster and bereft of anything resembling soul, and most of his choruses are unforgivably sloppy and practically unintelligible, like on the track “Dazzlement,” which contains the profound refrain “It’s gangsta/Baby, it’s thugged out/Cause everybody is so high.” When listening to such a train wreck of an album, I wondered if Cherrywine’s past status as one of hip-hop’s premier hepcats is plaguing him in the same way notoriety plagued the Beat Generation – he must think that anything he spits out onto tape is genius. Unfortunately for us listeners, this is not the case.