Action Bronson: Mr. Wonderful ALBUM REVIEW

Action Bronson is a pretty funny guy. With his YouTube show, his penchant for rapping about food, and all of the interviews he's done where he comes off as a genuinely hilarious guy, I honestly wasn't expecting his debut album to be full of mind-bending or especially challenging music. And honestly, the music here is exactly what I thought it would be, for the most part.

I know Bronson is hailed for his mix tapes, but to me, they had a lot of good ideas and some good tracks, but ultimately felt undercooked in a lot of ways. While Mr. Wonderful doesn't shake that fact entirely, to me, this album easily has Bronson's best material. However, it also has some of his most baffling. For instance, the interlude track "TRUE LOVE STORY 2017" is a truly awful moment featuring an older man singing about a girl (or drugs). If this track had been sung by a better vocalist, or maybe set up a more compelling song, I'd be okay with it, but instead we get "City Boy Blues" which is not even a rap song, but has Bronson going all bluesmen on us. Again, this isn't a terrible IDEA, but Bronson is not a good singer... at all.

I can accept his vocals on a track like "Brand New Car" because it comes off as more of a joke than something I'm supposed to take seriously, and that track only features this off key singing for short bit before going into some solid rapping from Bronson, who is infinitely better at rapping than singing. Finally, to cap off the issues I have with this album, some tracks here, like the penultimate "The Passage" or most of "A Light In The Addict" hardly feature Bronson at all.

However, aside from these few tracks, I actually loved a lot of what I was hearing on Mr. Wonderful. The singles on this album are all great; "Terry" is a smooth track that has Bronson rapping about heartbreak, and the track "Baby Blue" has an excellent hook and a hilarious guest verse from Chance The Rapper. "Easy Rider" finally finds a home on this album, and the track "Actin' Crazy" is my favorite Action Bronson track by far, it just has all the elements that make his tracks enjoyable, and has a killer beat to boot. There are also a couple other nice deep cuts with "Falconry" and "Galactic Love" which both could have been longer, but they are great nonetheless.

So, while I wasn't head over heels for this album as a whole, I still found an overall enjoyable album in Mr. Wonderful. I only hope that Bronson practices a little more quality control on his next studio effort, because I know he can be a lot more consistent than this. Still, I can see myself bumping tracks like "Baby Blue" and "Actin' Crazy" for the rest of the year.

8.0/10