The Daily Spin, October 19
Electric Guest | Plural
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 songs from each album right here.
Album: Plural (2017)
Artist: Electric Guest
Link:
When I try to think of corollaries for Electric Guest, I struggle, not because their sound is terribly unique, but rather because they blend so many influences they’ve pulled together so well - ‘My Omen’ leans into the Daft Punk of it all, while much of the album calls forth a sort of Empire of the Sun meets Tame Impala, and underneath, it feels like The Knocks and and Chromeo are trading paint putting a lot of these blocks together.
Four years on from their debut, Mondo, Electric Guest feel less like a group deigning to play to the retrofuturistic crowd and instead an artist coming into their own identity, one that contends beautifully with this sort of acidic electro-funk, a bit like Foster the People and Fitz and the Tantrums got together and threw the guitars aside for synths.
The album, at its best, is outstanding - ‘Sarah’ plays the role of the ballad near-perfectly, while ‘Oh Devil’ brings this delicious trip-hop feeling to the plate and I cannot eat enough. Though it’s not an album I find myself coming back to fairly frequently, every once in a while, one of these tracks comes up on shuffle, and I find myself thinking of them, of the concert I saw with them in 2018 with COIN on my college campus.
Can’t beat a memory like that.
Rating: 8.6/10
Best Tracks: Sarah; Oh Devil; Dear To Me
Worst Tracks: Back & Forth