Eg and Alice
24 Years Of Hunger

LA RECENSIONE

Eg White and Alice Temple, better known (?!?) simply as Eg and Alice, released what would remain their only musical endeavor in 1991. In hindsight, the project turned out to be very ambitious: trying to shake up and blend at least a decade (or perhaps more) of pop music. The result was a juicy compendium consisting of eleven self-produced songs that aim to redraw the guidelines for what pop would be throughout the nineties.

We start off with a bang with "Rockets", which attempts to best synthesize a summit meeting between Steely Dan flirting with Everything But The Girl, a kind of experiment they repeat even more blatantly in "Mistery Man" and "Crosstown". Surprise comes from "And I Have Seen Myself", where our artists even make a foray into disco territory, with highly appreciable results..
Barely time to finish dancing, and we immediately return to form with the delightful "So High So Low", bringing us back to the realms of high-class easy listening.
A chapter of its own deserves "Indian", a song released at the time as a single. I don’t know if the perfect pop song has ever been written, but here we get frighteningly close. We humans do not know what happens in these 3'48", but what is certain is that I feel a sense of envy for those approaching such beauty for the first time.
Could there be a lack of homage to the Fab Four? When in 1967 the Beatles wrote that piece of history that is "Sgt. Pepper", they must have left countless wandering melodies floating in mid-air, which many have drawn from over time, and "IOU" is a glaring example. The spirit of John Lennon lives on here.
In closing, we are catapulted directly to Minneapolis, to the one who perhaps best represented pop in the broadest sense during the eighties, Roger Nelson aka Prince. "I Wish" is an unequivocal apocryphal Prince.

Probably this album is too personal to have influenced future generations, and considering that they expressed their talent only here, I can't help but wonder if they did all this by chance.
One last note: this album went out of catalog shortly after its appearance, and as such, it is practically unobtainable.