The Daily Spin, October 26
Stromae | Racine Carree
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: Racine Carree (2013)
Artist: Stromae
Link:
The highest album on my board by listens that we haven’t covered (outside of video game soundtracks), Stromae’s Racine Carree was one of my first real ventures into non-English music - and what a venture it was.
From the first instance, the opening saws of ‘Ta fete’, Stromae continues the dominant hold he held on Francophone music, following on 2010’s Cheese (and lead single ‘Alors on Danse’, a track that grew popular enough to earn a Kanye West feature remix) with an album fully of snappy wit (though the lyrics are admittedly hard to follow, speaking as someone with a limited grasp of French). Despite that, the mood of each track is readily apparent - take ‘carmen’ and ‘batard’, whose angry ripcord synths ballast Stromae the same way that ‘ave cesaria’ builds joy and ‘quand c’est’ presses hurt into each and every note.
Despite the easy impressionability of the beats - and truly, it establishes van Haver’s credo as a producer as much as anything else, ranging from piano ballads like ‘merci’ to swing with ‘tous les memes’ to classically European dancehall fare with ‘Papaoutai’ and ‘moules frites’ - it’s those same lyrics that stand out as profound ventures on Racine Carree. ‘Papaoutai’ handles van Haver’s loss of his father, a victim of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, while ‘Formidable’ contends with heartbreak as anyone knows how - get drunk as all hell. ‘Carmen’ handles the suspicion of social media, and ‘ave cesaria’ is a rollicking yet touching tribute to a Cabo Verdean musician, Cesaria Evora.
It’s this ability to convey emotion that sets Racine Carree apart - because a lot of people can make great dance music, and a lot of people are fantastically talented at bringing deeply cutting sentiment to their sound, but few, if any, are as capable of bringing the pair together as Stromae.
Rating: 9.6/10
Best Tracks: Ta fete; batard; Tous les memes; merci
Worst Tracks: humain a l’eau