If 2004 was the year for Dizee Rascal and the armies of ‘grime’, 2005 sees Roots Manuva returning to prove to other British MCs that you don’t have to sound amateur to sound genuine. The album Awfully Deep has a more finished sound than we usually hear from rap on this side of the Atlantic. While Roots Manuva’s patented lo-fi tones and reverberating bass lines remain evident, a certain sheen glosses over the record, hailing Timberlandesque production techniques involving dull clicks and sharp bleeps.
Judging by the album cover, which pictures the rapper in an old theatre adorned with a harem of women in high heels and black dresses, whoever is marketing Roots Manuva is clearly aware of the potential in pushing him as a blinged up, crystal sippin, ho-fuckin rudie. Luckily, his music is more interesting.
While there are certainly references to be made to LA style gangster rap, the most driving and pressing influences here come form Jamaican dub and the trip-hop scene in Bristol and London in the 1990s. Tracks like Colossal Insight and the title track Awfully Deep have an electronic sound that uses all the basic sound effects found in old skool jungle and cheap toy guns to refreshed ends.
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The subject matter on Awfully Deep occasionally suffers from the ego that inevitably arises from a one-man show pushed forward as the leader of a genre. On the whole however, Manuva remains observant and down to earth, as on Thinking, a track about being a “twit” spending time “looking and tits” and being unemployed for his whole life.
Move Ya Loin is probably the album at its best, and The Falling, a would be inspirational anthem about the evils of taking drugs, STDs and gang violence, is by far the worst and most ill-placed track on an otherwise accomplished record.
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