When Chance the Rapper shows up at the end of "Baby Blue" with a verse of playfully inconsequential insults-"I hope every soda you drink already shaken up," "I hope the zipper on your jacket get stuck"-before admitting he hopes his heartbreaker is still happy, he pulls off in half a minute what Bronson couldn’t in fifteen: using an imagined story to reveal humanity through humor.īronson, it should be noted, has hit that note before. This digression is conceptually ambitious, but the execution seems to purposefully undercut the exercise, as if the suite was the result of an argument between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other about what the album should accomplish that was won by neither.
It’s all wrapped up by "Baby Blue", in which Bronson kisses the woman off with those same whining vocals, over a Mark Ronson production that could have fit on an Amy Winehouse album. Next is "A Light in the Addict", a maudlin and forgettable song made with longtime collaborator Party Supplies that features an unnecessary multiple-minute piano outro. On "City Boy Blues", Bronson fashions himself as a bluesman, singing and mumbling over a jazz-bar instrumental. What follows is a musical of sorts wedged into the gut of the album, with Bronson continuing the story of a runaway girl who has left the protagonist brokenhearted. After an opening handful of tracks that sound reliably like Action Bronson songs-with a few noticeably ritzy, retro-soul productions-the album shifts into a suite introduced by "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)", a sketch in which an older man sings to Bronson about a lost love who disappeared from the streets. Those nagging vocals-the kind of singing you do to momentarily piss off your significant other-not only embody the spirit of the album, but they conveniently highlight exactly when and where Mr. Instead, it turns out, he’s just going to derail his own. Yet those atonal vocals end up feeling like a warning sign that Bronson is not going to upend the way rappers make their debut albums. In theory, this approach would be refreshing, and if any rapper could let the attendant album pressure roll right off his back, it’s Bronson, who inhabits a character whose reality bares little resemblance to his-or our-own. The moment feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades. Consider that the first time we hear Bronson’s voice, he is singing in an exaggerated off-key warble. The song falls apart twice, with Bronson cursing that he can't get his vocals right.