CD - Roots Manuva: SLIME AND REASON

 
 
 
 

If there’s a commercial sold-out sound, this album is about as far from that as you can get. You just know dickheads aren’t listening to it and probably never will, which is a shame for an artist who needs to sell records but a bonus for those of you who don’t like dickheads listening to good music. Slime And Reason doesn’t fly straight off the bat like Roots’ 1999 album Brand New Second Hand did with opening track ‘movements’. It’s not until the fourth track ‘Let The Spirit’ that the previous three tracks slip into perspective. “Let The Spirit” is like a Scarface soundtrack remix with lo-fi techno dibble-beeping in the background and synth chords that plod along and inexplicably move your body to a beat that’s more implied than sounded out.
 
Slime and Reason, like most things from Roots Manuva requires a little persistence from the listener. Once you’ve adjusted your dial to pick up his frequency you’ll soon regard tracks you thought were quite ordinary as album classics and the best tracks a bit like a drug you just want to keep hitting. Even the most difficult tracks to get into like ‘Do Nah Bodda Mi’ was revealed upon repeat listens as a pretty hilarious track full of Manuva’s sharpest pen strokes.
 
Three years on from Awfully Deep, Manuva has returned to take back ground. In a genre filled to the brim with  retenders, Stockwell’s Rodney Smith A.K.A Roots Manuva has slipped back into the scheme of things without  ecessarily adopting the changes that have taken place during his absence. There is, as previously mentioned,
a nod towards recent synth revival but tracks like ‘Buff Nuff’ fall down as less than solid purely because it’s not Roots. Roots is more original, deeper and far more interesting than this genre often offers up and if you persist
beyond any scepticism you might have, I’ve no doubt Rodney will reward you.
 

 

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