Roots Manuva

Esteemed British rapper Roots Manuva's latest hip-hop/dancehall experiment is party and come-down in one, with enough of a gray area in between to keep your brain and your ears engaged throughout. Case in point, the jubilantly cracked opener, "Again and Again," with ska horns, stoked electronic rhythm, and Jamaican DJ-indebted flow, but paradoxically intense rhymes like "The pain that break me is the pain that make me." Over the first third of the album, that 8-bit dance-hall vibe is sustained, with Roots often dialing himself down in the mix, letting his flow take more of a rhythmic role in the music than anything else. A swarming mass of percolating arpeggios, ray-guns, kung-fu melodies, and background vocal hooks (courtesy of himself, I'm assuming) keep us not only entertained but riveted.

A tonal shift toward a darker, more skeletal sound--with elements of dub, acid-techno, electro, and even house--carries the middle of the record beautifully, with all kinds of media-saturation and digital interference sounds in the background evoking something truly weird, maybe a cannibalistic game-show in a sci-fi movie? "It's Me Oh Lord" climaxes this mood by layering two vocal choruses plus a vocoder and the most epic synths on the record. "2 Much 2 Soon" suddenly becomes more minimal, and showcases the MC worrying about money, seeming unusually vulnerable for a rapper even as he brags about his skills. This clearer, more confessional direction will carry us through the last three, faultless tracks on the record, wherein he imbues seemingly generic titular sentiments such as "I'm a New Man" and "The Struggle" with a pragmatic conviction of both rhyme and production that’s all his own.

Best of all is "Well Alright," a declaration of disaffected purpose that features Roots' most mesmeric, unhinged rapping, and makes you want to follow him for sure, even though his message is more about where he’s not going than where he is.

— Nate Cunningham
09.25.08