Umpteenth album in Alan Maman's crowded discography, also considering the EPs and mixtapes, the number rises to well over fifty projects accredited to his name.
Maman hasn't remained idle in recent years and in 2020 he upped his game just enough to make him one of the busiest and most popular producers of the moment. But the moment is getting out of hand: in the first semester, The Alchemist has made three projects that are easily among the nominees for the album of the year ("The Price of Tea in China", "LuLu", "Alfredo"), then it seems to have lost a bit the control with his two latest instrumental releases.
Taking up what I wrote for the previous instrumental, also in this case to really understand something of what the producer has done here, you have to go and look for its meaning or have a serious background of his side projects: not everyone wants to do it nor they have that kind of knowledge, in this way, Alchemist continues to do a job that is for a select few, for his close core fans, almost automatically excludes all listeners who came confidently from "Alfredo" and burns them without too many hesitations, staying with his niche audience he previously had.
Like the previous one, this record resembles an instrumental mixtape, but presents a substantial difference: The Alchemist cuts the audio of the program "Fuck, That's Delicious", which stars the creator Action Bronson, Big Body Bes and the Alchemist himself, making a sound collage featuring these guys discussing food over jazzy beats.
The choice of the title and the minimal cover betray most of the fans, who expected a collaboration and / or a disc with MF DOOM, simply because of the title (people are sick...), as if Villain™ was a word that belongs only to Dumile: unfortunately, this fact isn't the only cause of the rain of criticism that has crossed the album, the rhythms made here are on the whole really superior compared to the previous instrumental disc, where the boy had clearly decided to get rid of the his second and third choices, but because of all these vocal samples, the final result is a sonic mess.
There are solid jazzy boom baps, with great melodic and musical samples, midtempo drums, the music is at times excellent and everything suggests that it would be a recommended listening for fans of Alchemist, Roc Marciano and Griselda, but the continuous skits extrapolated from the show of Action Bronson almost completely ruin every track, despite the producer making laudable attempts to create a tape based on his TV character. I'm not convinced of the goodness of the final result: Action Bronson himself and Big Body Bes arrive as guests, but they limit themselves to exchanging a few spoken lines, almost without actively contributing to the tape (thus doing something different than Gunn, in the album published three weeks earlier).
Not essential, not recommended: maybe, I just said, releasing both of these last two albums as a mixtapes would have been ideal. 6/10.
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