Album Review: Planet Frog by Action Bronson

The eighth Action Bronson album takes the drums away and fills every bar with proper nouns. A few songs slow down long enough to let a single image hold.

Courtesy of Baklava Industries.

Most of Planet Frog has no drums. Or drums so faint they might not be there—a snare drifting in every few bars, a closed hi-hat tapping somewhere at the edge. Between Daringer’s loops and Harry Fraud’s saxophone-and-piano arrangements, the production found its way to one destination from different directions: a handful of sounds and a voice. Action Bronson co-produced nearly every track here, his eighth album. Once you hear his fingerprints on sessions he didn’t solely produce, the consistency makes sense; he pushed Daringer (who returns from Johann Sebastian Bachlava the Doctor with five tracks of his usual blank economy) and Fraud, who normally builds bigger, toward a matching register. Even the noisier tracks, handled by Kenny Beats and Human Growth Hormone, don’t clutter. No overdub is wasted on the record.

Bronson always stuffed his bars with proper nouns, but on earlier records, from Dr. Lecter through White Bronco, the references usually landed somewhere recognizable. A Queens intersection. A restaurant with a name. Here the nouns just cycle. Wrestler names and vintage car models and NBA players and cities on four continents pile up in a single line and erase each other too fast for any image to stick. One bar puts him in a Lancia, the next alone in an M3, the bar after that trailing John Rambo through Myanmar before an M16 turns someone into a Cinnabon. It was always a dense style (maybe the densest anyone’s running right now), and here it costs him something. Every reference gets canceled by the next. Too many images for any one of them to sit with you. Or maybe not too many. Too fast. The speed is the selling point and the problem. An hour later, not a bar survives.

On more than one song, Bronson hides a body in something you eat. On “Olympic Vince Carter,” it’s a calzone. On “Condor,” the pizza. Same construction again on “Mutations,” this time inside a bacon, egg, and cheese on the road. Barely a word changes, and the motif runs through tracks built by different producers. It’s the only recurring idea on the album worth anything, a construction that wires Bronson’s kitchen to his threats without him pausing to explain the connection. Food absorbs the body. Each one delivered level, like something he’s been saying for years.

Roc Marciano guests on “Peppers” and doesn’t adjust. Over a drumless Daringer loop, Marciano and Bronson are stacking brand names and threats on a single beat, but Marciano runs colder, calling himself “New York Christopher Walken” and rattling off references to British Walkers and Walkmans before anyone else gets a word in. Good bar from Bronson on the track (his ancestors in a 911, shifted manually, left-handed or right-handed), but Marciano steals the song. His nouns carry more weight, more history folded into each one. Different story on “Triceratops.” Paul Wall rode through psilocybin and Gandalf pipes with Texas ease, and Lil Yachty opened with Rent-A-Center furniture in mansions and got to his cousin’s death mid-verse. Barely a pause; the ace got poured and the verse moved on. On an album where most images get cycled past in a quarter-second, Yachty’s grief is one of the only moments where the music makes contact with something outside the game. Meyhem Lauren on “Mandem” mirrors Bronson too faithfully to push him anywhere, but they were making songs on each other’s projects as far back as the early mixtape era, and the comfort between them is honest.

The only song on Planet Frog that couldn’t exist on any other Bronson album is also the one that does the most damage to it. Clovis Ochin opens “Simone” in French, speaking about climbing a mountain bare-handed, killing demons at the summit, pressing grapes, watching gray hairs become grace. When Bronson enters, the references fall away. Pain affects his sleep. Gray hairs mark his face. He wants to break a cycle with the woman he loves. But the gap between this song and the other twelve exposes something the proper-noun cascade spent the rest of the album keeping at a distance. Whatever Bronson was protecting himself from (or trying to) by replacing every image before it could settle, “Simone” puts a name on it. It makes everything around it worse.

An album this short shouldn’t drag like this. But “Condor” and “Olympic Vince Carter” run at matching tempos over similar production, and the reference-cycling hits matching speed in both. “My Blue Heaven” gets 90 seconds and a pleasant bassline, mentions lahmacun once, and ends. Planet Frog as a concept, the interdimensional amphibious creatures and spoken-word intros, went nowhere the music followed. Even at half an hour, the filler shows.

What the album needed was “Mutations.” Drugs stored in his spinal cord. Bodies covered with limes and salts, a quarter million on St. Johns. Deacon Jones highlight reels, alone, blowing trees. A thousand horses through the village, until he’s home.

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “VHS,” “Peppers,” “Mutations”