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Departure Without a Destination? Infected Mushroom's The Legend of the Black Shawarma

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Amit Duvdevani and Erez Eisen, the expatriate Israeli duo that make up Infected Mushroom have been having a mid-career crisis for so long that it seems like their state of rest. Famous for the fast and furious dance floor mixes in the “psych trance” subgenre they started putting out while living in Haifa during the 1990s, they have repeatedly stretched out in new musical directions in recent years without ever fully abandoning the club and rave audiences that got them started. Sometimes the hybrid tracks born of this musical ambivalence have been interesting and effective. More often than not, though, they have resulted in awkward, hesitant work, sure only of what it isn’t sure of.

In that respect, the band’s latest release The Legend of the Black Shawarma represents significant progress. Although the album does sprawl across a variety of genres, a renewed emphasis on hard-driving rhythms combines with the band’s hearty embrace of metal to give it a consistent tonality. “The Legend of the Black Shawarma” recalls the Ministry of New World Order. “Project 100” conjures the sort of bombastic furor that the Slovenian act Laibach made into a calling card. And “Herbert the Pervert” complements the album’s closing remix of The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” by sounding like a remixed mash-up of Metallica’s greatest hits.

The problem is that Infected Mushroom seems to have expended so much energy ironing out the wrinkles in their fusion of superficially antithetical speed genres that the finished product frequently falls flat. For the most part, the songs here sound like the soundtrack to an action-packed video game. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. Many fine artists are writing for games now, because they represent a way of making ends meet while also reaching audiences that radio no longer compels. But there’s a difference between what works while you’re blasting away at virtual enemies and what proves rewarding in the absence of game play.

While it could be claimed that trance is the sort of music that makes the distinction between doing and listening irrelevant – the pace alone gives it the same aura of artificial stimulation that intense video games elicit – the fact that Infected Mushroom have veered so far from their original course reduces this argument’s explanatory value. The Legend of the Black Shawarma isn’t the sort of record that makes you want to dance, even though it communicates a restlessness that can make sitting still excruciating.

Listening to The Legend of the Black Shawarma, it’s difficult to tell whether Duvdevani and Eisen made the record it in a spirit of irony or not. Certainly the album’s title, as well as the gatefold artwork that accompanies it, with its images of dwarves and fairies, suggests the possibility that they wanted to look back on their “psychedelic” origins with eyebrows raised. The hard part is figuring out from what position such a sly critique might come.

Does the fact that Infected Mushroom now live and work in Los Angeles, hanging out with folks like Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction and Jonathan Davis from Korn – both make cameos here – make them regard Israel’s beach-and-beats culture, with its impetus to tune out reality at any physiological price, as a perverse imitation of a lifestyle Southern California mastered decades ago? Or have they grown estranged from their “primal scene” because they no longer feel the sense of constant menace that fueled its characteristic adrenaline rush?

Either way, The Legend of the Black Shawarma sounds like a record that achieved cohesion at the expense of connection, with its different tracks converging on each other as they retreat from everything else. Were the overall experience of the record sufficiently fleshed out with interesting details, the sort that people seek when they want to “trip out,” that might have been considered a virtue. As it is, however, this is an album that requires an investment that it fails to reward, particularly on repeated listening.