Chance The Rapper - Acid Rap: #12 on Top 50 Albums of 2013 Pitchfork (Ft. Chance the Rapper)

At a passing glance of a Tumblr timeline it'd be easy to mistake Chicago's Chance the Rapper for any number of new jack blog-savvy revivalist rappers struggling their way around high-pitched Pharcyde chatter and "93 Til Infinity" instrumentals. And certainly the production on Acid Rap, with its sampled nods to J Dilla and Tribe Called Quest, leans towards that sort of single-minded throwback. But as a rapper, Chance's nostalgia is immersive, not constructed. It's telling that he openly cites the influence of under-heralded West Coast crew Freestyle Fellowship, a collective that emphasized perpetual stylistic reinvention on a micro level (and provided the big bang for both Pharcyde and Souls of Mischief's elastic flows). So where the A$APs of today pick up hand-me-down and watered down cadences and beat at them repeatedly and the Joey Badasses struggle through existing patterns that are usually far above their competency level, Chance is going back to the point of origin and rebuilding the old styles from scratch. Every track here is kicked in a different cadence—usually jazzy and always frantic—and it's striking to hear that model applied by a young rapper whose raw foundational material is Kanye and Eminem. He's using the same toolbox as the greats but drawing on very different blueprints.

Chance's writing takes a similarly expansive approach to history. For a 20-year-old, Chance's point of view is oddly melancholic and sentimental, but this perspective only strengthens his narratives. He writes with a vivid sensory memory—you can smell the blunt guts or hear the fireworks and mistake them for gunfire in his words. It's a paradoxically level-headed approach on an album where the performance is so unhinged and the second line is "the acid made me crazy." But maybe the title—and Chance's whole Woody Woodpecker meltdown rap style—is a bit of a misdirect. Acid Rap isn't about the trip, it's about the flashbacks. —Andrew Nosnitsky