It’s finally here. Pardon my excitement. In Issue 32, I reviewed RAC’s Stranger’s Pt. 1. This month, the album was released in its entirety. While I’ve talked thoroughly about the first half, I had to write about the second here.
Like the first half of the album, this is a collection of remixes and original material (with singer collaborations). Listen to Repeating Motion to get a taste of the pick-me-up anthems that litter the record. I adore All I Got, which is as catchy as anything you’ll hear all year.
While the first half of the record was largely pump-up, the second half slows things down a little bit to contemplate. Listened to in tandem with the first half, the record feels much more complete. Tracks like 405 work better alongside the rest of the album than they do on their own. While I love Cheap Sunglasses, I think the best new track here is We Belong, which is a beautiful manifesto for electronic music as a genre, but also for those of us who understand the nature of electronic things: nothing lasts.
While describing the record as melancholic would be a stretch, it would be fair to say it feels like the unravelling of a Friday evening. Pairing the album with its predecessor is strange, though: because the first half is so danceable and this record is so much quieter, it makes the album feel front-loaded to a fault. The records are better when listened to independently.