94/100
“The Food Villain” is like watching “F*ck, That’s Delicious” (the Vice food show featuring Action Bronson, the Alchemist, Big Body Bes, and Mayhem Lauren) on acid.
The Alchemist shows his decades of talent by jam packing a 24-minute, 16-track project with colorful, but evil sounding beats that are heavily layered with audio snippets from conversations from “F*ck That’s Delicious.” The samples include the cast of friends joking with each other, and Al paints himself as a “Food Villain,” someone who “hates everything” in terms of food. Action Bronson puts it this way on “I Hate Everything.” His friends continue this narrative throughout the whole album, notably on “Lamb Sauce” and “Cigarette Drum Machine,” where his crew claims he doesn’t like anything except cigarettes and drum machines.
Source: Artist
On the show, Alchemist tends to be soft-spoken. Hearing him take what happens on the show so seriously and making art out of it surprises me.
There are only two official features on the project, one from Action Bronson and one from Big Body Bes. The raps they deliver are brief, mostly off-beat, but add to the nutty nature and off-beat feel of the entire project.
Al layers in the massive amount of audio snippets in the songs with precision. Often, the instrumentals cut out for split seconds to make room for the vocal snippets to be audible. He adds lots of delay to the samples, which makes the album a fever dream of conversations between him and his friends about food.
The beats are in Alchemist’s classic style, often-boom bap drums, with old, evil-sounding, but lush, chord-filled samples. The mixing of the project is earwormy and almost confusing at points, but nonetheless keeps the listener in a constant fever dream of food conversation and beautiful, cold-as-ice instrumentals.
I compare it to J Dilla’s classic album “Donuts” in what he does to the vocal samples. He creates a soundscape with strange and random sound snippets controlling the narrative of the songs.
Another similarity to “Donuts” is the songs’ short lengths. The move of keeping the project short but with a large amount of songs keeps the listener wanting to hear what happens next.
All of Alchemist’s recent releases have been concise; his November 2019 project “Lamb Over Rice” with Action Bronson had 7 songs and clocked in at 20:25, his March 2020 project “LULU” with with Conway the Machine had 7 songs at 22:54, his May 2020 project “Alfredo” with Freddie Gibbs had 10 songs and clocked in at 35:02.