| On an opening-up cut, With Light Within, in which he takes it upon himself to give up the good-advice on modern-life, Kamal 'Radioinactive' Humphrey (previously billed, with cultivated exoticism, as Kamal Humphrey de Iruretagoyena) offers the sweet sentiment: "be playful, with the heart of a child". Whilst it's a lot more charming than some of the other awfully-earnest bits of little-hip-hop-verse-of-calm hokum he can somehow stomach serving up (like: "befriend a tree/write poetry" and "be thankful, and live in the moment"), the evocation of childlike wonder and childish adventure goes well with the image Humphrey's been cultivating as Radioinactive. After his last album, Pyramidi, showed him, on its cover, dressed in an astronaut costume, stepping out onto some tricked-out visual-art foreign-planetary soil, here his self-referential second longplayer delivers a cover in which a pre-adolescent Humphrey is banging the drums; the upshot of this snapshot, and the cover that goes with, being his latest (latent?) longing to free the boy buried under the weight of his modern age. Now all growns up, it's clear Kamal has cultivated Radioinactive as the place he can escape to the capricious whimsy of creative creativity; Humphrey, later, on the comic infomercial-culture critique "The Physics Of My Success," earnestly offering more earnest advice, with "if you're old and bitter/relive your childhood" fitting in with his favourite lyrical tone. Such said, Free Kamal lacks all-over-the-shop scattershot silliness of Pyramidi, whose Sun Ra-references and manic Arabic flourishes and old-sci-fi-soundtrack'd tracks were strewn over a longform longplayer built both for long-distance-runners and the seriously short-attention-spanned span; said debut disc clocking in at 30 tracks in 70 minutes. Here, this gear finds him getting a little more grown up, helming a more disciplined set that tones down on the musical indulgences; aided in such by across-the-board production from beatmaker/multi-instrumentalist Antimc (aka Matthew Alsberg), who errs t'wards more 'soulful' samples than Humphrey's sci-fi/Egyptian tendencies; such warm-toned grooves contrasting, of course, with Radioinactive's rapping, which, in Anticonvict style, can easily get called high/whiny/nasally/rapid-fire/etc. - Gravity Girl |
2XLP/Out Of Print