The Roots - Rising Down
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The Roots’ 10th album opens with a familiar gripe: Why aren’t we stars yet? The complaint, though, is from 1994—we’re listening in on a conference call, as the band argues about who is to blame for their stalled career. At first, it seems like yet another woe-is-me grumble from a group that regards itself as terminally jinxed—always on the verge of mass popularity, never quite breaking out of the fringes—but then we’re back in 2008, the music starts and something unexpected happens: That old anxiety over success disappears, and we’re swept into an excellent, punchy album full of youthful swagger and anything-goes experimentation.
Rising Down is tightly focused and appealingly modest in its ambitions. There are fewer longwinded jams or stabs at radio hooks—“Birthday Girl,” a sunny, Fall Out Boy–assisted love song that was supposed to be the lead single, has been chopped from the LP like a foreign growth. Instead, the album stays dark, fast-paced and lean. MC Black Thought shares the mic with nearly a dozen guests who help prove that his stern missives are best enjoyed in interrupted bursts. On the hellish, paranoid title track, Black Thought, Mos Def and Styles P one-up each other with tales of a dying planet and crooked governments; on the tightly wound “I Can’t Help It,” long-estranged Roots affiliate Malik B details his struggles with addiction; newcomers Truck North and Porn (now that’s a tough name to Google) steal the show on “Singing Man,” hauntingly deconstructing the criminal mind.
It’s a grim album with moments of underdog hope, like an angelic chorus or a clamorous, Go-Go’s–influenced beat. On the closing track, we end where we began, in the 1994 shouting¤ma...
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