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When this album came out, ,I thought it was such a disappointment. I remember I was in NYC at the time, and was seeing promo posters abound, and I was just geeked. Could hardly wait for a new Roots album.
Funny, coming off Phrenology, that I felt so let down and felt....cheated by what I received with TTP. Sure, there were some tracks that were good, but songs like "Don't Say Nuthin'," "Somebody's Gotta Do It," "Duck Down," and "I Don't Care" hurt my soul. Not only did I feel like these were too slick and lacked the character of the previous albums, but the album was the short! Way shorter than what we'd come to expect from this group.
So over time, I basically ranked this pretty low...while still acknowledging that, paradoxically, it contained some of their best songs ("Web," "Star," "Boom," "Stay Cool").
After revisiting? This is not a bad album AT ALL.
Maybe it's easier to digest now that I've seen where they went (and also have seen the direction that music as a whole has gone towards these days), but there's not much that you can complain about when talking about this record. Thought kills it, the guest spots are kept to a minimum (always a big complaint for me when it comes to post-TTP albums), and the beats generally bang. Some are a bit different than you'd expect based on what they'd released up to that point. But I listened to this one way more than any of the others upon revisiting for this little experiment.
I think if anything, this one felt like less of "an album" than the ones that preceded it because it didn't seem as strongly linked together via concept/sound/etc. Ironically, that relatively-stripped approach may be why I have been playing this non-stop this week. It's just fun and easy to get into. Kind of surprised at how quickly this one ascended the ranks.
Ok, enough talking here, let me get into the individual song posts... www.twitter.com/seandammit
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