ROOTS MANUVA
Alternately Deep
Big Dada
· A collection of leftover songs feels overdone.
It was either poor planning or a massive swell of inspiration that left Roots Manuva, a.k.a. Rodney Smith, with more than 30 tracks for his 2005 album, Awfully Deep. Regardless, the result is Alternately Deep, a collection of those leftover songs thrown together with some B-sides, remixes and other extra material. The album is just that – thrown together. It's a hodgepodge of rather bland stuff from a guy who can do much better.
The album starts with the song "No Love," which is really what Roots Manuva has been getting for the past five years. Maybe it was the Mercury Prize nomination in 2002 for his album Run Come Save Me (it is believed that the award is cursed), or perhaps it is the rapid insurgency of U.K. Grime, but for some reason, Roots Manuva has been slept on more than Ikea mattresses in a college town.
"Don’t nobody got no love for Smith / There ain’t no peace there ain’t no justice but right now I really couldn’t care much less," he says in the chorus. Unfortunately, this album probably won’t wake people up to the fact that Roots Manuva is one of the U.K.’s best MCs who can kick a flow over glitched up electro or chopped-up dub and whose South London patois make his lyrical gymnastics all the more enjoyable.
The fourth track, "Nobody's Dancing," comes off as a woefully undanceable number about people not dancing anymore. Unlike fellow countryman Kano's smooth track "Nobody Don't Dance No More," Roots Manuva doesn’t offer something worth shaking an ass to. The album does get a push in the right direction from Grime producers Jammer and Lotek, but even those songs add to the disjointedness of Alternately Deep.
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