Roots Manuva

With Run Come Save Me having established Roots Manuva as a vital cog in the engine driving hip-hop from the UK to respectability, this project has been issued as a stopgap as we await what he'll come up with on his third full-length. The tracks collected here, as the title suggests, are culled from the sessions of Run Come Save Me and alternate between instrumental dub workouts and vocal tracks. If anything, this release confirms Roots Manuva is something of a studio hermit as his dub tracks like "Witness Dub" and "Brand New Dub" confirm his penchant for studio trickery and for the works of dub legends and shows some promise for future artistic possibilities. While interesting, the meandering grooves don't always seem to go where they're intended and lack a guiding rudder. That anchor would be Roots Manuva's own voice. "Man Fi Cool" again begs the question when Roots and Toronto's Kardinal Offishall will link up and "UK Warriors" featuring Riddla offers up a succinct summary of the frustrated yet persevering UK hip-hop artist set to an appealing bouncy bass. Roots Manuva's digging into his "low budget archives" has indeed unearthed some diamonds in the rough to check for, but this ranks as very interesting but not necessarily essential material.