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. It's clear Kamal, now all grown up, 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 offers
more earnest advice, with "If you're old and
bitter/ Relive your childhood" fitting in with his
favorite 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/nasal/rapid-fire/etc.
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