The Roots

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The Roots

The Roots "Undun" album

- Release date : December 2011 -

Undun is the tenth studio album by The Roots and the first concept album that the group has released, detailing the life of the fictional character Redford Stephens. The album was officially released on December 6, 2011 through Def Jam Recordings.

"Undun" album tracks and lyrics

"Undun" album reviews

The Roots' umpteenth album is titled after a Guess Who song mutilated by countless lounge bands since 1969. It incorporates a Sufjan Stevens recording, mixtape-style, for the purpose of starting a four-part instrumental suite that closes a program lasting only 40 minutes. Based on those details, it would not be irrational to think that the band’s well of inspiration might be dry or tainted. While the well might be slightly tainted, it is full. Undun is based on the life of Redford Stephens, a fictional product of inner-city New York who was born in the mid-‘70s and tragically passed in 1999, the point at which the album begins -- with a quiet EKG flatline. Appearances from MCs Big K.R.I.T., Dice Raw, Phonte, Greg Porn, and Truck North, as well as contributions by singers Aaron Earl Livingston and Bilal, flank principal voice Black Thought, yet this is no hip-hop opera or anything close to a typical concept album. The existential rhymes, seemingly created with a shared vision, avoid outlining specific events and focus on ruminations that are grave and penetrating, as if each vocalist saw elements of himself and those he has known in Redford. What’s more, Undun probably shatters the record for fewest proper nouns on a rap album, with the likes of Hammurabi, Santa Muerte, and Walter Cronkite mentioned rather than the names of those who are physically involved in Stephens’ life. (The album’s app, filled with video clips and interviews with Stephens’ aunt, teachers, and peers, provides much more typical biographical information.) Musically, Undun flows easier and slower than any other Roots album. The backdrops ramp up with slight gradations, from soft collisions of percussion and keys (“Sleep”), to balmy gospel-soul (“Make My”), to Sunday boom-bap (“One Time”). There's a slight drop into sinewy funk (“Kool On”) that leads into a sustained stretch of stern, hunched-shoulder productions, highlighted by the crisply roiling “Lighthouse,” that match the cold realism of the lyrics. The strings in the slightly wistful “I Remember” and completely grim “Tip the Scale” are a setup for the Redford suite, which is nothing like padding. It glides through the movements, involving mournful strings, a violent duel between drummer ?uestlove and guest pianist D.D. Jackson, and a lone death note that fades 37 seconds prior to silence.

*** by Andy Kellman, All Music Guide ***

The Roots have been so good for so long (two decades) that it’s perhaps easy to take them for granted. The Philadelphia octet is higher profile than ever as the house band for the “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” TV talk show, but somehow its excellent 2010 album, “How I Got Over,” was overlooked. The same mistake shouldn’t be made with “Undun” (Def Jam), the 10th and best full-length studio album of the group’s career.

Over 14 tracks and 38 filler-free minutes, the album traces the birth, cold-sweat life and early death of a street hustler, consumed by paranoia, crack and unfulfilled dreams. The tightly wound narrative is a familiar tale animated by its sharp turns of phrase, coal-grey images, and, most of all, its evocative music. In a way, “Undun” sounds like a continuation of the brooding first half of “How I Got Over.” On the 2010 album, redemption eventually arrived. Here, there’s no way out except in a casket, and the music underlines the tragedy: the episodic horn riffs of the haunted “Sleep,” keyboards that chime like bells in “Make My” and slam with percussive force on “One Time,” the kick-drum thunder of “Stomp,” the rock-gospel feel of “The OtherSide.” At times, the music evokes a church service or the eerie stillness of a funeral parlor, as if the semi-autobiographical character at the center of the story, Redford Stephens, were already dead.

*** by Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune ***

Despite their buoyant presence as Jimmy Fallon's late-night house band, the Roots have always been at their best expressing quiet desperation and spinning old-school tales of struggling upward. Their 12th album crackles, undun, with knowing lines like ''I live life trying to tip the scales my way'' (via guest MC Dice Raw). That perfectly distills the band's shark-like worldview, in which there's no room for pregnant pauses or musical atrophy — just hunger. A-

*** by Kyle Anderson, Entertainment Weekly ***

To grow up in an urban landscape is to struggle with perseverance and survival, a regular cat-and-mouse game in which the winners find ways to navigate the desperate metropolis and the unlucky fall victim to life’s tempting seductions. It’s a dangerous battle boasting certain success stories and weighted with unfortunate casualties. There’s the young man with an uncanny skill, whose divine ability lifts him from the despair; there, another young person seemingly content with the street game, for whatever reason. Then there’s the enigmatic figure stuck somewhere in-between, a conflicted soul with the inkling to play it straight, yet he chooses a life of fast money and crime, cutting his life terribly short in the process.

On The Roots’ new album, undun, the Philadelphia octet tells the story of that character, depicting the demise of semi-fictional character Redford Stephens through a series of sparse soul melodies, thoughtful string arrangements and stomping hip hop grit. Here, The Roots tell the story backwards, beginning with Redford’s death and backpedalling through the circumstances that ordered his steps. The result is a remarkable display of creative unity and a stellar masterpiece sitting alongside the group’s best work. While undun continues The Roots’ recent trend of dark recordings, it does so with a comprehensive flair that caters to listeners old and new, nodding to the despondent vibe of 2006’s Game Theory while flashing optimistic glimpses of light, similar to 2010’s How I Got Over.

And while the drums bang with intense ferocity, the words take centre stage on undun, as Black Thought and a host of others — including frequent collaborator Dice Raw, and Phonte of The Foreign Exchange — wield rhymes that embody Redford’s restless spirit, establishing an aggressive tone along the way. "With undun, we hoped to give voice to an imagined internal dialogue that could take place as a deceased black youth looks forward into our post-modern void," Roots bandleader Ahmir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson wrote in a recent blog entry on The Huffington Post. To that end, the group hits the mark. I Remember finds Thought discussing calmer times, even if the character’s current lifestyle has washed away his memories. Sleep, with its scant percussion and trunk-rattling bass, feels like a sobering funeral song with Redford speaking from the grave. "There I go, from a man to a memory / I wonder if my fam will remember me," Thought rhymes.

Eventually, undun transitions from hip hop to avant-garde fare, turning the album on its ear with a short instrumental collage of cascading piano keys and classical compositions. Multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens repurposes his own song, Redford, for the first interpretation of undun’s four-part closer. Will to Power finds ?uestlove and pianist D.D. Jackson playing musical tug-of-war over a frenetic jazz breakdown similar to Water, from The Roots’ Phrenology album of 2002. All told, undun stands firm as a moving eulogy, full of life in its own murky way and amazingly cohesive in its approach. While the album’s main character lived only 25 years, the music here has the vitality to live much longer.

*** by Marcus J. Moore, BBC Music ***

Anyone who forgot the Roots' wrathful gravitas as a result of the group's recent mellow albums was given an intoxicating refresher when they welcomed Michele Bachmann onto Late Night with Jimmy Fallon with a taunting rendition of Fishbone's "Lyin' Ass Bitch." It was an explosive, cheeky display that cut through any sanctimony left in Bachmann's long-ago sputtering geek-show campaign. So naturally, Fallon himself Tweeted an olive branch to the woman on the Roots' behalf, which goes to show that some prefer their anger slow-cooked and predigested.

Though only a pithy 38 minutes in length, the Roots' new album, Undun, serves up indignation in such manner: tempered, strung out in a rolling wave of despair and discontent. If it's not as immediately galvanizing as, say, Rising Down, it lingers. Borrowing a riff from Sufjan Stevens's Michigan and building a doomed character around it, Undun's conceptual pitch is akin to a hip-hop retooling of Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void—minus the pyrotechnics, plus the efficacy. The album opens on a flatline, as "Dun" makes clear right off the bat that the fictional story of Redford Stephens doesn't come with a happy ending. From Redford's death, Undun flashes back through the plaintive signposts of a life needlessly wasted.

As noted by ?uestlove in the press, Redford is a young black man given an empty choice in life: to either try to avoid drugs or to succumb to them. Either way, his life's journey is predestined to be marked by crime and poverty, only to end prematurely. As a bitter aside in the jagged, piano-tracked "One Time" says, "I wonder, when you die, do you hear harps and bagpipes if you're born on the other side of the crack pipe?" Later on, in the funereal dirge "Tip the Scale," an eerily double-tracked Redford howls: "I'm a side of suicide, heads or tails/Some think life is living hell, some live life just living well/I live life tryin' to tip the scale my way."

If all Undun did was detail the lonesome death of Redford in the now-quite-familiar form of the Roots' hip-hop balladry, it would still be a compelling listen, with the disquieted memento mori "I Remember" and the snaky grooves and Mellotron curlicues forming the outro to "Make My" as obvious highlights. But it would still lack the sort of focus and clarity one would expect from a project like this. What really sells the album's concept is the four-part suite that closes the ersatz memorial service, beginning with a note-for-note needle drop of Sufjan Stevens's "Redford" and then opening it up into variations both neo-classical and horror-jazzy in nature before rectifying the two discordant halves in "Finality." Seemingly borrowing from the stylistic playbook of Phrenology's "Water," the "Redford" suite leaves all the album's questions tantalizingly unanswered, and the briefness of the suite (a symphony compacted into just over five minutes) compared against the variety of its musical styles makes manifest the sad brevity of the hypothetical life to which Undun pays tribute.

*** by Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine ***