The Daily Spin, August 24
Raury | Indigo Child
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Indigo Child (2015)
Artist: Raury
Link:
My biggest gripe with Indigo Child is that it never seems to be much of anything - for all of its words, it says surprisingly little, and I’m left desperately wishing there was stronger sentiment behind a record that ostensibly seems like it’s trying to claim a stake in so many emotionally weighty subjects.
Sure, it’s fun for a while, but at the end of the day, there’s a whole lot of nothingness that leaves me uninterested in coming back to this album. Songs oscillate between cringeworthy and mundane, lyrics that seem to want so desperately to make a statement and then fall flat on their face.
The instrumentation here is solid but unremarkable, and the earwormiest songs tend to be the ones with the lyrics I’d like to revisit the least. It reminds me a lot of late-career Chance the Rapper (and you want to be earlier in that trajectory, undeniably). It really does feel like, given time, he’d be competent enough to create something masterful, but this is a pie pulled from the oven days early.
Rating: 6.4/10
Best Tracks: Superfly
Worst Tracks: God’s Whisper; War (Part 1)