Well, there's the title of the record, right up there. I suppose that's a good starting point as any in attempting to go on about what this record means: pop culture icon reference; drug trip reference; skeet skeet skeet reference. I have seen some pretty ridiculous debris floating through the dadaist/edgy/postmodern memetic flood of absurdity that teenagers on messageboards and YouTube expel into the popular consciousness-- stuff which seems largely intended to straddle a line between "joke" and "symptom of autism." And maybe Infinite Livez (née Steven Henry) is another symptom of the mindset that revels in the idea of modern DIY culture as some sort of hallucinogenic, scatological catchphrase factory, even if he's a bit more elevated than the usual out-of-context "Dragon Ball Z" screencaps. Infinite Livez's music can be classified quick-and-dirty style as Kool Keith meets Captain Beefheart via the past 10 years of British post-hip-hop, and his sense of visual design looks like some kind of Luis Buñuel version of Yo Gabba Gabba. I've been listening to his music for a while now and I still find myself stuck, confoundingly enough, at the "what the fuck is this" stage-- and I don't even know if that WTF is horrified or awed.
But that doesn't mean he's not a worthwhile listen in some way or another. His first two full-length CDs were 2004's Bush Meat, a smart, surrealist exercise in racial and sexual provocation (featured tracks: "Spade Invaders"; "White Wee Wee"; "The Adventures of the Lactating Man"), and 2007's Art Brut Fe De Yoot, a somewhat more inscrutable and abstract record that marked his first album-length collaboration with Swiss avant-electronic duo Stade. Morgan Freeman's Psychedelic Semen continues Art Brut's abrasive, single-take electro/improv, shifting slightly back towards the b-boy Fluxus of Bush Meat-- a bit alienating and disturbing yet still kind of funny in a between-the-lines, laugh to avoid getting scared kinda way.
None of the conceptual humor is as straightforwardly laid out as Bush Meat's paeans to faux-Chris Ofili elephant-dung art and semi-comic body horror-- in fact, most of the "jokes" themselves fall by the wayside here in favor of a creeping discomfort hidden behind surface whimsy. The funniest track on this album is "I Was a Saddam Body Double Pt. 2", and that's mostly because Livez spends most of its length doing a dead-on imitation of Elmo speaking in tongues. Lyrics tend to skew towards impenetrable strings of non-sequiturs and thematically slippery free associations that ditch you right when you think you've gotten on their trail.
Stade's production does a lot to forward the uncomfortable side of the album's equation, starting with the chortly drunk-hop of "Hoxton Smoothie" and the suspiciously straightforward groove of "Man Machine"'s 1980s funk melancholia before moving into itchier turf. Much of the album wobbles on shaky-kneed midtempo hip-hop rhythms that feel like head nods gone dizzy, and trying to get a grip on the wheres and what fors of its construction will probably leave you lost-- there's gagging Moog synths, clapped-out breaks, and an overall sense that everything's held together with bloody gauze and rusty staples and all kinds of infection-causing nastiness.
Henry's voice is what justifies all that, or at least justifies it when it works: "Man Machine" intercuts throaty r&b-style singing with raspy, genuinely creepy wails and gradually merges the two, "Slack Babbath" is a harrowing vocal duet with Joy Frempong that sounds like eagles fighting, and his flat but sinister invocations on "Public Ultra Image Magnetic" sound just like that title implies-- Critical Beatdown meshed gruesomely with Metal Box. Yeah, that album title's saucy enough, but its feel is more accurately laid out in one mid-album track, a stoned stagger crammed into a bassbin filled with sinister metallic laughter and agonized screams and lyrics spinning in fifteen hostile directions. It's called "LOL to the Depths of Hell". It should've been the title track.
