Rapper Boldy James was born in Atlanta, hails from Detroit, and sounds like he's never stepped outside of Queensbridge. The producer Alchemist is from Beverly Hills, but has produced some of gangsta rap's bleakest East Coast rap, for Mobb Deep and others. The two of them together makes perfect sense: For them, Queensbridge is a state of mind, a place to visit within the world of records. On My 1st Chemistry Set, they key into that thick atmosphere like a couple of virtuosos.
The obvious out of the way first: Boldy's voice is a dead ringer for Mobb Deep's Prodigy. The resemblance is so strong it raises hackles the first time he opens his mouth. But like Action Bronson, who has ambled past his constant Ghostface comparisons to his own persona, Boldy sneaks a unique sensibility under the cover of a very familiar sound. He's a dead-eyed tough guy, a position that starts at "unamused" and goes darker from there, but beneath the pose, his words leap eagerly around, betraying his dirty secret: enthusiasm. "I used to write raps off of my spelling words, so I could learn the meaning of them and how to spell them," he told David Drake back in 2012. "Because if you use a word in a sentence, and don’t know the meaning, you can use the words around it to get the definition of the word you were looking for." Respectfully, this isn't the most intimidating sentiment in the world, and it positions Boldy closer to someone like Black Hippy's resident word-nerd Ab-Soul.
On "Moochie," he gives a slang lesson that isn't a lesson at all, but a chance to render you glassy-eyed: "My dank Mary Jane and my big chain Julie/A deuce is a split, a baby is a stoolie/A kilo is a brick, a quarter is a cutie/If you tellin you a snitch/county is the skidooski." Got that? On "Rappies," he mutters "Slow rolling them snow bunnies in Clinton Township/Them bastards trying to give me about sixty/For transacting them Graham crackers of that brown shit" and the syntax—*transacting them Graham crackers of that brown shit—*blooms and lingers. Oh, and he's got a deadpan sense of humor: "Life is Precious/a fat ugly bitch that'll get you whacked," he cracks on "What's the Word". On "Traction," he slyly quotes Redman's "Time 4 Sum Aksion", and while Boldy isn't exactly a straitjacket-straining wildcard like Red, their rhyme pads could definitely be friends.
Alchemist, for his part, brings his most muted and sensually gloomy side to the project. Boldy has a lot to say, and Alc, though the bigger name of the pair by far, settles back, each beat just present enough to give the exact right cotton-mouth coating to Boldy's verses. "You Know" loops a busy bass line and almost nothing else—some wisps of strings, a clipped vocal like a red sock in the dryer. "Moochie" is just a shiver of violin tremolos, scratches, and some highly unsettling music-box chimes. The drums don't knock, and in fact barely rise above a cough.
There are guests that breeze through. Freeway continues his murderously intense lap of the mixtape circuit's lower rung; when he raps, it's impossible not to want him to be back on top, at least for that moment. Action Bronson trades bars with Boldy on "Traction." Earl Sweatshirt delivers a thicket of quotables—you need to hear what he does with the rich rhyming possibilities of "Tan Cressida", which he lays out and then attacks like a juicy steak. But none of them eclipse Boldy, who makes the most of this opportunity and delivers some of the best verses of his career. He has been steadily deepening, as a writer and rapper, and by now, the lousy emotional weather of QB rap is his own, a personal storm cloud he generates wherever he goes.
