The Daily Spin, July 28
RAC | EGO
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: EGO (2017)
Artist: RAC
Link:
When I reviewed BOY earlier this year, I spoke to RAC’s clearly evident talent, but made clear my opinion that I felt his skills were grossly misapplied within the structure of the record - I felt like features were poorly applied, put onto songs that didn’t match their energy all while Anjos’ music lost that shine that had been present in his work up to that point. For an album about childhood and growing up, it didn’t much feel like there was heart to it.
EGO is why BOY disappointed me so much, a complete reversal in basically every way. As a followup to 2014’s Strangers, EGO shines as a complete and cohesive storyline, the sort of album where each and every feature fits with every beach-laden guitar, every glimmering stroke of the keyboard, the swelling strings and flowing synths that expand and contract around each vocalist akin to a heart’s beat.
EGO never deigns to be something it can’t become - though it’s never overtly energetic, it’s always steady, and while it oscillates the full range of human emotion, it also manages to stay pretty tight to what Anjos has always done best - rock-influenced indietronica, calling forth luminaries of varying popularity and letting them shine without ever downplaying any aspect of the songs at hand.
An album that is so capable of illustrating emotion while sticking so tightly to that bandwidth deserves immense acknowledgment. Each song plays so directly into the next, yet if you were to play me a clip from any of them I could tell you exactly which one said clip came from - that distinction within form is an incredible achievement to pull off.
There are five albums that exist on this earth that I would give true 10s to. We’ve looked at four of them previously, and it is with great pleasure that I tell you all that the fifth is EGO.
Rating: 10/10
Best Tracks: Johnny Cash; I Still Wanna Know; This Song; Heavy
Worst Tracks: n/a