Review Summary: A brainiac in fact, son - you mainly lack attraction.
After Encore, Eminem just kinda started to lose it. Whatever magic was flowing through the albums from
Slim Shady LP to
The Eminem Show had fizzled out come
Encore. The best songs on
Encore felt more like holdovers from
The Eminem Show, stuff that was thrown onto another album in order to keep the length down. After
Encore, the general quality of Em's records started to go down, down, down, resulting in the mediocre
Music To Be Murdered By and the godawful
Revival, an LP so bad it barely even sounds like the king sh*t that Eminem was throwing down in the early 2000's.
Given how underwhelming Eminem's stuff became, I thought it'd be nice to walk all the way back to the winter of '96, traveling back in time to a pretty cool and interesting point in Eminem's career when he wasn't the white king of hip-hop or the failing, tryhard rapper he is now. Instead, he started out as someone in between, a young, upstart dude with a lot of talent but not a lot of polish. This resulted in
Infinite a surprisingly great album whose only real problem is the fact that it just doesn't *quite* sound like the Em we'd come to know and love.
You wouldn't think that at the start of the record, tho, because the title track is easily one of Eminem's most GOATed tracks. "Infinite" has a dope, space-like, 90s lo-fi beat and it's full of insane multisyllabic and internal rhymes like "My acapella releases plastic masterpieces through telekinesis that eases you mentally, gently, sentimentally, instrumentally with entity dementedly meant to be Infinite." Like, that's some crazy-good stuff! "Infinite" does seem to lack a theme and feels more like clever boasting, but I'll be damned if it's not *excellent* boasting; "Infinite" is both fun and super chill, and that's actually where a lot of the songs on this record exist. A lot of these songs just exude a sense of fun, and, in my eyes, the low-budget nature of the beats actually add a charming, laidback vibe to
Infinite.
"It's OK" sounds like an evening stroll through a run-down ghetto town, and the electric pianos and echoes in "Maxine" add a cool kind-of-underwater sound to the whole song. "Never 2 Far" is full of energy and features a beat I could totally hear on an old 90's video game, "313" and "Open Mic" are fire tracks where Eminem and his homies just spit verses between one another, almost like a long-form rap battle, and "Searchin" is probably the most pop Eminem's ever been, featuring an RnB vocalist singing and adding some girlish charm to the chorus... and unironic lyrics of
love delivered from Eminem, where he actually seems to want the company and intimacy of another girl instead of rapping about how much he wants to kill women, like he became notorious for later on in his career.
It's so different from Eminem's later material!
Infinite is scrappy and earnest and actually really, really fun - the closest Eminem comes to sounding like the Eminem that dominated the charts is the super-good "Backstabber", where Eminem tells the story of a psycho criminal let loose from an asylum in classic Slim Shady form. Other than that,
Infinite is an album where Eminem says, without any irony whatsoever, lines like "but in the midst of this insanity, I found my Christianity." And I love it! This shows a different, forgotten side to Eminem that only pops up every now and then in the rest of his records - an earnest, hungry, and emotional but not over-the-top Marshall Mathers. This isn't Eminem trying his hardest to sound tough or shock or sound inspirational, this is just a dude that wants to listen to his mixtape, and I actually really respect
Infinite for its honesty and how fun its songs wind up being as a result.
Not everything is great. I can tell the beats are the weak point of the album - even though *I* kinda like how scrappy the beats sound, I can totally see how they'd weaken someone's opinion of the record considering how much better Dr. Dre's production sounds. Some of the poppier stuff on this record doesn't really hit - "Tonite" is an okay party track but I could go without the 'come on and sing along' hook, and "Jealousy Woes II" barely even sounds like Eminem, sounding way more transparently like Nas and AZ whereas the rest of the album merely has a (strong) Nas and AZ influence. I also would have liked more variety to Eminem's flow in
Infinite - he pretty much raps through each song with the same exact pace, which can make the verses sounds awfully same-y at times.
But this is a fire debut nevertheless! It bombed upon release - I think only a thousand copies of
Infinite were ever made, and according to Eminem, it sold "maybe 70" of those copies. In a way, though,
Infinite's failure led to the creation of Slim Shady, which arguably led to Eminem becoming the 2000's pop culture icon that we know and love so well.
Infinite may not be the most unique album - you can definitely hear the influences Em was pulling from at that time - but the title track is easily one of the best songs he's ever done, and even at the record's worst,
Infinite is still a pretty above-average LP loaded with great tracks, stellar rhymes, and a lo-fi vibe that instantly takes you back in time to a cool, unique point in Eminem's life.
FAVORITE TRACKS:
Infinite (!!)
It's OK
Never 2 Far
Backstabber
