Pitchfork

The name and the oiled-up torso on the album cover may belong to the Alabama rapper Rich Boy, and the album may even be named for him, but Rich Boy isn't really Rich Boy's album. Instead, it belongs to the Atlanta producer Polow Da Don. Polow produced or co-produced more than half of the album's songs, and he's releasing the album on Zone 4 Inc., his vanity label. Polow already has a few pop hits on his résumé (the Pussycat Dolls' "Buttons", Fergie's "London Bridge", Ciara's "Promise"), but this album is really his coming-out party, the moment where his style hits its groove and becomes a singular aesthetic; even the album tracks that Polow didn't produce seem to exist in the universe he's created here.

Polow's style exists somewhere between the epically futuristic space-pop opuses of Timbaland and the more humid, organic sounds of melodic mid-1990s Southern rap producers like Organized Noize and Pimp C. Polow starts "Throw Some D's", the hit first single, with a light, ethereal electric piano that dissolves into swollen strings and thudding drums. Later, playful synth-beeps find their way into the mix, floating above the guttural soul. While most rap producers let tracks resolve themselves by the first chorus, Polow tends to keep piling on new elements throughout until the song turns into a claustrophobic mini-symphony. His hard and aggressive tracks are usually light and pretty. His light and pretty tracks are usually hard and aggressive. And he has a way of coaxing every little piece of the track out so that it complements every other part.

As for Rich Boy, more often than not he's just another piece in Polow's puzzles. By any standard, Rich Boy isn't a particularly remarkable rapper, something that becomes painfully apparent every time a great rapper like Pastor Troy or Big Boi shows up to make a cameo. Rich Boy rarely breaks out of standard rapper tropes about cars and sex and money ("Do the G-thing in ya G-string/ I won't even pay attention to the wedding ring"), and even when he indulges his conscience, the results are pretty dismal. "Lost Girls", for instance, is an innocence-gone-astray lament like Ludacris' "Runaway Love" except dumber, if you can even imagine that. But he's got a huge, swampy Mobile drawl, the sort of accent that might sound exotically Southern even if you weren't born north of the Mason-Dixon line. Most of the time, he's just another ingredient in Polow's cluttered mixes, and his heavy, stretched-out croak does a good job bridging the expanses in those tracks, which is all he really needs to do. When he shows promise, as on the heated, anguished rant "Let's Get This Paper", it's a bonus. But he mostly just lets the beats do their job, a smart decision on his part.

The album's stunning, high-impact production fits it into the recent tradition of epic, monolithic Southern-rap albums like Young Buck's Straight Outta Ca$hville and Young Jeezy's Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101, but more than those albums, it's the work of one idiosyncratic creative mind. Polow da Don is just now finding his voice, and he's got a great career ahead of him. If Rich Boy is lucky, he'll stay along for the ride.