If There’s a Heaven I Can’t Find a Stairway

Long before Kid Cudi and Kanye West brought ego rap to the mainstream in recent year, The Roots have creating moody rap; songs about the downtrodden for almost two decades now. But last year’s How I Got Over may have been their moodiest album to date, even bring in a bunch of shoe gazing alternative artists they ran into during their day job as the house band of Late Night. So how to you go even darker for the follow up: you create a concept album about the life and death of a street hustler.

undun follows Redford Stevens (named after Sufjan Stevens whose Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou) gets sampled on the album) through lots of paranoia, self doubt, anger, and helplessness that is easily felt listening through your speakers. The words on undun are more words from a script than lyrics. But as Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi recently found out with Rome, a soundtrack without a movie just feels incomplete even if The Roots has released more music videos to support their album. And it does not help the album ends with four piano and strings heavy instrumentals across four minutes (as well as starting it off with one also).

But in-between there are plenty of goods songs regardless of how they plug into the greater theme. Make My, featuring Big K.R.I.T. and Dice Raw, may be the smoothest rap song ever made. Despite the heavy material surrounding it, Kool On, with Greg Porn and Truck North, is a club song based upon a great loop. But as a whole, the album is brought down as you spend too much time thinking of how the song fit into the overall album instead of just enjoying individual tracks. Still undun still to be one of the better concept albums in recent memory and shows twenty years later The Roots are the most innovative group in hip-hop.

Song to Download – Kool On

undun gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.