Send "The Roots " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Undun is the story of a man, Redford Stevens, dying in reverse, rewinding from the moment he became a statistic and hitting the points in his life where he's at his most self-aware. That he's a criminal who got caught up in the familiar street-hustle trappings that the modern media's documented countless times is a pivotal detail-- it's hit at an angle that seems to emphasize the futile inevitability of it all. His life could be any number of misdirected narratives that ends with a toe tag, and what details listeners learn about him are hazy, buried under archetypal turns of fate and decisive struggles. That this protagonist is a fictionalized composite of a handful of real people, filtered through a matter-of-fact narrative that splits character ambivalence with journalistic impartiality, only makes his lack of direction and the failure of any real closure stand out even more. "Lotta niggas go to prison," Dice Raw states on "Tip the Scale", "how many come out Malcolm X?"So the Roots' latest album isn't a sprawling, rise-and-fall crime story, not a condemnation or a veneration of a man living outside the law, not a bullet-riddled grand guignol heavy on explicit details of soldiers getting cut down. It's a character study of a man whose existential crisis ends only with his death-- a death gone largely unspecified, the glamor and tragedy washed over with a doomed resignation. That's a hard thing to pull off, even for a band as given to deep-thinking concepts as the Roots are. And when your main lyrical catalyst is Black Thought-- a man more given to allusions than direct statements-- it's likely that it'll take a while for the full scope of Undun to really sink in. If and when it does, it might strike listeners as a bit skeletal: omit the mood-setting instrumental bookends, including a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off Sufjan Stevens' "Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou)", and you've got maybe a half hour's worth of material. By ?uestlove's accounts, writing Redford's story introduced the headaches and challenges that come with scriptwriting into their songwriting, and what's left on Undun is the end result of frequent revisions and rewrites that attempt to reconcile character, theme, and continuity. If it comes at the expense of nuance, it's not always obvious: There's an easy-to-trace narrative line from Redford's acceptance of his fate ("Sleep") to his acknowledgement of how close it's approaching ("Make My"), back through declarations of aggravated toughness ("One Time"), and celebratory fatalism ("Kool On"), along ups and downs that juxtapose motivation ("Stomp") and helplessness ("Lighthouse"). When the vocal portion of the album ends with two of the bleakest sets of verses in the Roots discography, peaking with the estrangement of "I Remember" and the desperation of "Tip the Scale", Undun reveals itself as a story where a man's actual death isn't quite as tragic as the circumstances that pushed him to it....full text |
| Bbc |
| To grow up in an urban landscape is to struggle with perseverance and survival, a regular cat-and-mouse game in which the winners find ways to navigate the desperate metropolis and the unlucky fall victim to life’s tempting seductions. It’s a dangerous battle boasting certain success stories and weighted with unfortunate casualties. There’s the young man with an uncanny skill, whose divine ability lifts him from the despair; there, another young person seemingly content with the street game, for whatever reason. Then there’s the enigmatic figure stuck somewhere in-between, a conflicted soul with the inkling to play it straight, yet he chooses a life of fast money and crime, cutting his life terribly short in the process. On The Roots’ new album, undun, the Philadelphia octet tells the story of that character, depicting the demise of semi-fictional character Redford Stephens through a series of sparse soul melodies, thoughtful string arrangements and stomping hip hop grit. Here, The Roots tell the story backwards, beginning with Redford’s death and backpedalling through the circumstances that ordered his steps. The result is a remarkable display of creative unity and a stellar masterpiece sitting alongside the group’s best work. While undun continues The Roots’ recent trend of dark recordings, it does so with a comprehensive flair that caters to listeners old and new, nodding to the despondent vibe of 2006’s Game Theory while flashing optimistic glimpses of light, similar to 2010’s How I Got Over. And while the drums bang with intense ferocity, the words take centre stage on undun, as Black Thought and a host of others — including frequent collaborator Dice Raw, and Phonte of The Foreign Exchange — wield rhymes that embody Redford’s restless spirit, establishing an aggressive tone along the way. "With undun, we hoped to give voice to an imagined internal dialogue that could take place as a deceased black youth looks forward into our post-modern void," Roots bandleader Ahmir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson wrote in a recent blog entry on The Huffington Post. To that end, the group hits the mark. I Remember finds Thought discussing calmer times, even if the character’s current lifestyle has washed away his memories. Sleep, with its scant percussion and trunk-rattling bass, feels like a sobering funeral song with Redford speaking from the grave. "There I go, from a man to a memory / I wonder if my fam will remember me," Thought rhymes....full text |
| Guardian |
| The house band on Jimmy Fallon's US talk show, the Roots recently accompanied a Republican politician's guest spot with the Fishbone song, Lyin' Ass Bitch. That kind of mischief isn't among the ingredients of the Philiadelphia collective's first concept album; the story of a dead young man called Redford's struggles and mistakes in reverse. It opens with a heart monitor flatlining, before tinkling pianos and warm melodies deliver lines pondering mortality and whether heavenly bagpipes await those "born on the wrong side of the crack pipe". It isn't all as harrowing as that sounds – the luscious tunes of Make My, The Other Side and the poppier I Remember make it an iron fist in a velvet glove. What it isn't – quite – is the magnum opus it could be. The second half loses impetus, although Sufjan Stevens's Redford, delivered in three movements, makes a powerful elegy....full text |
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