The Roots undun
I swear there are still only 24 hours in a day but if anyone wanted proof to the contrary, lead Root/drummer/producer/pitchman ?uestlove is probably the man to talk to. Entering the band’s third decade, The Roots have long established themselves as innovators and aesthetes; champions of the road and pioneers in the studio, their records are as likely to stimulate your brain as your booty. The past couple years have found them occupying an entirely new role, serving as the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s late night talk show. It seemed a sketchy idea at first, but the opportunity to backup Fallon’s multitude of musical guests has only served to expand the group’s notoriously well-rounded palette. This latest release (one of two simultaneous releases the band is currently promoting; like I said, these cats stay busy) is the kind of risky artistic attempt that could only come from a band with their pedigree, their musical IQ. Undun is a conceptual song cycle, told in reverse narrative. It is a memoir from the afterlife of a character named Redford Stephens, dead at 25. “There I go, from a man to a memory,” raps Black Thought, and as you hear him say it, you can feel the short, violent and unglamorous lives that the Stephens character is made to sum up. The musical passages on undun are light on booming bass – a fact that neatly separates The Roots from just about every single one of their peers – and are instead sustained by wonderfully crystallized, early ‘70s Stevie Wonder-ish keyboard phrases. Glimpses of dusty soul records and wah-guitar fill in the spaces between. It’s an experiment gone shockingly right. One would be hard pressed to imagine how a precious, orchestral-indie icon like Sufjan Stevens would fit into this dark and deep tragedy, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t turn up, or his influence at least, all over the closing four-part suite. Based on the Stevens composition “Redford (For Yia Yia and Pappou),” it hurtles from piano/drum free jazz to solemn string quartet to a final, bruising chord, closing this remarkable record in an appropriately unsettling fashion. At this point in their career, The Roots need no further accolades to cement their legacy. They are, for all intensive purposes, free to do as they please. Financially secure. A-listers. That a band of their ilk would devote itself to something so gut-wrenchingly honest and, let’s admit it, ugly, speaks volumes about their collective artistic integrity. Respect.