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[dustedmagazine]

Icewear Vezzo — Rich Off Pints 3 (Iced Up Records)

Detroit vet Icewear Vezzo continues his Rich Off Pints series with a third mixtape. It’s another attempt for Vezzo to break out of the regional scene and make it federal, but this strategy backfires.

It’s become a running joke that Icewear Vezzo can only rap on one type of beat. You can mock him for that, but you can’t fault an artist who found a blueprint for exploiting it too much and too often. While Rich Off Pints 3 employs beats by more than a dozen producers, they do sound the same. If not for the producer’s tag you wouldn’t tell the beats apart: Antt Beatz, Primo Beats, Cashout Beats, BeatsbyMAX and others know what gets Vezzo going. It has to be a slow, booming production where Vezzo spits his lines with no hurry at all.

When Vezzo shines, he does it with a splendor, like on the track “The 6” where he goes from a joke to a money flash to a macho posture in the three lines: “Yellow diamond stones, yellow as piss, look like a Winnie bear \ Fifty thousand dollars in my pants, shit barely fit in there \ It's only robbers, shooters at my trap, no you can't get in here.” There are plenty of duds, too, one where a whole track is just random bits of information glued together by the rapper’s charisma. He can also be so inaccurate at rhyming, the listener may wonder if it’s a song or just Vezz mumbling something in the mic, like on “Up the Scoe”: “Four hundred thousand just in the jewels, see them diamonds glisten \ I was shootin' up the bag when they was droppin', breathless.”

Vezzo complains that he is the last rapper from Detroit who hasn’t received his due despite a large fanbase.  Listeners attuned to regional scenes know they are in for a treat if they go for a new Vezzo tape. On Rich Off Pints 3, as on the previous tapes, he takes quite a few national rap stars on, from G Herbo to Lil Durk, to catapult himself on the national orbit (or so he thinks). While this strategy might lure in some new fans from other regions, these stars don’t bring anything of value to the table. All the tracks with them are filler. What’s missing is other Michigan artists with whom Vezzo has chemistry. His federal plan goes sour.

If you’ve just tuned in to the series, check out the second tape which gives better bang for the buck. This one is solid but hardly of national value.

Ray Garraty

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[jumpoutboy90]

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