Action Bronson - Blue Chips 7000 - LP Vinyl

Blue Chips 7000 is the third installment in a vintage Bronson mixtape series (all bearing the Blue Chips name), and it’s the first to ditch Party Supplies, a frenetic, campy Brooklyn producer, as the sole man behind the boards. Still, the retail album calcifies the formula the pair instigated with the mixtapes—bare raps over funky, almost kooky rare-groove loops—and Bronson remains surrounded by the producers that know him best. Accordingly, the beats on Blue Chips 7000 save its star from doing too much. “Let It Rain” jumps around like a twitching 1970s porn soundtrack before a swampy sax solo steals the show. “TANK” is the type of glitzy 1980s pop rock that Bronson has obsessed over for years. All of the beats are off-kilter, but none of them sound alike.

As much as he is a prolific emcee, Bronson is a talker. And while there are short interludes and song intros littered throughout the latest Blue Chips, once a beat kicks on, Bronson is forced to rap. On “La Luna,” he barks out orders that he needs a Towncar. “Yo, what beat is that? Ooh that shit is funky,” he wonders excitedly about the car company’s jazz-fusion hold muzak, before launching into an off-the-cuff verse over the Alchemist’s organ-laced sample flip. It’s an endearing snapshot of a guy who sometimes seems past rapping but keeps doing it because he enjoys it so much. Blue Chips 7000 is full of unadorned samples and short on features. The reggae singer Jah Tiger toasts a slinky, quaint hook over a sunny Knxwledge loop that seems to decay back onto itself. Rick Ross pops up on the Harry Fraud produced “9-24-7000,” a shimmering and less peculiar beat than the rest to accommodate his lounging. For all the weird brags Bronson whips up, none are as casually haughty as Ross’ kicker. “I’m the label owner/I’m the only one can shelf me,” he raps as a guest on an album that has been tormentingly delayed by the label. The gravel in Bronson’s vocals distracts from just how high-pitched and nasally it is. “Daddy back/With his long white Cadillac/Now it’s time take a nappy nap,” he wheezes, sneering on the smooth organ of “Bonzai.” There’s a sheer glee in Bronson’s voice that is sometimes soured by the things he is actually saying. He’s flirted with disgusting, inappropriate lyricism throughout his career; here, Bronson has dropped the shock value but maintained the dopey swaggering.

Sometimes it sounds like Bronson is reading deliriously from a sheet of randomly generated phrases. “The full moon make me loco/Like I sniffed a whole baseline of cocoa,” he spits on “The Choreographer,” as if his only conceit was rapping something that nobody before him had thought to. He’s still fabling over beats, too, and at one point he swears, “I might hang off the side of the mountain to trim a bonsai/Perfect 10 on the swan dive.” Then again, Bronson is a joyously wacky guy, and his ridiculous non sequiturs mesh especially well with the eccentric boogie-funk of the Westside Gunn producer Daringer’s sample flip.

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