Look How They Got Me on the Def Jam Payment Plan

What is going on behind the scenes of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon? In front of the camera, The Roots have no problem with getting in on some comedy bits like Slow Jam the News or perform the Save By the Bell theme with Zach Morris himself, and don captain hats will backing Christopher Cross during Yacht Rock Week. But for their first album since becoming the house band of the unfunniest host of late night, they made the moodiest album of their career with How I Got Over which says a lot considering their bleak last two albums.

Late Night may be the key because when they are not backing fake Saturday morning characters, they have a front seat for a slew of indie bands that frequent Jimmy Fallon’s show like Monsters of Folk, Dirty Projectors, Patty Crash, and Joanna Newsom, all of which show up in some fashion on How I Got Over. And they definitively help with the moodiness to the start of the album with members of Dirty Projectors and the track opener and the album hits its heaviest with track number three, Dear God 2.0 which heavily samples the Jim James part of the Monsters of Folk songs. A bit of a disappointment considering The Seed 2.0 was a complete reworking of the Cody ChestnuTT song, not just a simple sample with some drums added on top during the verses.

Things do not start to pick up on the album until the title track six tracks deep. Thing stay relatively more upbeat after that highlighted by the quick bops of Tunnel Vision which goes straight into the funky Web 20/20 featuring Peedi Peedi with one of their weirdest beats the band has ever come up with. But even with that ending it is hard to shake the mood they start up at the beginning of the disk which Kid Cudi would find too depressing with lines like, “I’m in the slow lane, I’m on my Cobain.” Here’s hoping for their next disk, The Roots release some of the live performances from Late Night with the likes of the Beastie Boys, Smokey Robinson, Jimmy Buffet and their killer cover of Let’s Go Crazy with Incubus, just to show that the band can actually have fun every once and a while.

Song to Download – How I Got Over

How I Got Over gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.