The Price of Tea In China

Editors’ Notes There’s something mesmerizing about how uneventfully The Price of Tea in China unfolds—how business-as-usual Detroiter Boldy James tags the bodies in his stories, how LA producer The Alchemist’s dusty, sample-based minimalism leans more toward silence than sound. It’s not that James isn’t observant: At one point, he compares drugs in a Pyrex to oatmeal (“Phone Bill”); at another, he notices fresh chips in a brick wall from ricochet (“Slow Roll”). What’s exhilarating about The Price of Tea (albeit in a slow-burn, negative-space kind of way) is how carefully James manages to avoid smothering raw specifics—street names, grocery stores, outfits—with morality or philosophy. What emerges is music as keen-eyed, dispassionate, and hypnotically restrained as you imagine the job necessitates. As for the album’s title, the sense isn’t that James sees his marks as irrelevant, but that in the end, it’s all in a day’s work.