Awfully Deep - review

Roots Manuva also called himself Roots Mahooda once. I like how he does that; the guy's a little bit funny. Someone best described his music recently as 'an acquired taste' and I tend to agree with that. That is to say that his sound takes a while to get into, I intensely disliked 'Run Come Save Me' for the first month or so I had it, until it slowly began making sense (I'll never like 'join the dots' though!) and similarly his latest offering, 'Awfully Deep' is something that you're going to have to get your head around, because it's not what I, or anyone, would call easy music.

The LP starts off in a rather understated manner, with 'Mind 2 Motion' and 'Awfully Deep' both sounding like something you may have heard somewhere before, something you might not have expected a rapper to rap on (especially with the techno-sounding title-track) but still something from the recent past that's been put through the Manuva-machine, coming out the other end just a little chilled, a little off-kilter and a little silly. And silly is a word I'd use for this album, silly and dark seem to be the two moods (if silly is a mood) explored here.

Speaking of dark, the albums brooding undertones come to a head with the absolute classic single 'Colossal Insight' with a beat that so wonderfully smashes its way in at the start of the track and leaves you totally hypnotised for the duration. Again, the synth-line feels to me like something I've heard somewhere before, but mixed with all the sonic madness going on around it, and the truly different chorus (I don't know if he's singing out of tune, or just in a totally different tune than I'm used to, but it's nice) it all comes together to make one heck of a single. More obvious is the second single 'Too Cold', and the highly satisfying 'Rebel Heart' which will have you out of your seat, seriously beating your head, and kicking your feet to the infectious, ominous rhythm.

Also worth a mention (this album is best taken as an experience, not a check-list of songs for me to 'mention' or you to listen to separately!) is 'A Haunting' which is luscious in every sense of the word. Roots spits free-association poetry over the beautifully subdued dub-style rhythm. It's not a surprise that this is the song that Mr. Manuva had least to do with musically because it's the most direct, least complex, most analog/live sounding (all things that this album isn't for the most part.) It's the poetry though that really gets me, it's obvious to me that he wrote it on the spot and in a very short, spontaneous moment in time, and indeed when I first heard it I thought 'How could he put that on a record? It's meaningless!' But it isn't, and like all good music, the more you listen to this song the more you'll hear, the more possibilities for meaning you'll find in the things he's saying, it's pretty, really pretty.

The first 7 or 8 songs are the best in my opinion, and the album certainly doesn't get any worse after that point, but the darker sides begin to take over on tracks like 'Thinking' and the morbid 'The Falling'. However the albums best and most resonant cut for me will always be the first single, 'Colossal Insight' which is a classic, and with reference to his final verse on that song, I'm pretty certain that this will not be the Rootical ones 'final LP', he has a lot more to give, a lot more to say, and a lot more ground to cover musically. He is and always has been my first and only inspiration in English hip-hop music, because he's a free-spirit, meaning whatever this guy would end up doing in life were it not hip-hop, he would stand out and his determination to stay on top of his game shows that whatever else he would have done, he would have been good at it too. One of the best, here's to the future of Roots Manuva- one man.

Y.Misdaq aka Yoshi, 14-22 Mar 2005