Roots — Roots From the Underground

Debut album by the Roots, a duo from East Palo Alto, California, formed by Mob Boss and Papoose, who are respectively homonymous of a famous production duo formed by Mike Mosley & Sam Bostic and of a more famous New York rapper. The album is made for the label with which fellow rapper Chunk is signed, Murder One Records, with Chunk's producers G-Man, who plays guitar, and Sean T, who plays piano, keyboards and is credited as the unique producer of the beats. Chunk himself is a guest on the album along with Sean T and up-and-coming local rapper Scoot Dog.

The boys' project is quite simple, ten quite substantial tracks — none falls below two hundred and twenty seconds nor exceeds six minutes — for a total of approximately fifty minutes of listening. The cover narrates how this can be your tipycal album from the Bay: the name of the group is repeated, involuntarily, twice with the same font, a writing falls vertically to the left as the name of the group, the other is at the bottom under the figures of the two interpreters as the disk title, in orange is the rest of the title, above the two boys, one is clearly holding a firearm but the blurry photo doesn't help further. These elements let you know you're about to listen to a gangsta album, right? The back cover is perhaps even more gangsta, if that's possible.

In any case, the album personally starts badly with "Roots Come Down", which is a song I don't like due to a bland rhythm. Things improve immediately with the second choice, the effort suddenly changes, and for the better. I don't know what happened with "P.A.P.'s Going Murder One". Pulpy bass, I guess provided by Sean T, cause there's no other guys credited on the production, then a melodic, relaxed, very clean beat comes out, it seems like a rhythm taken from a Warren G album or the first Twinz CD. The guys make no mistake and drop bars with some of the smoothest flows on the record, a classic cut comes out, which sounds fresher every time.

The song leaves expectations that cannot be maintained. The following "9mm Massacre" still breathes the trail of that track and sounds better than the others, then the tape slows down and fails to offer the same level with a whole selection of somewhat generic rhythms and gangsta rap that you can find even in the most popular conscious records, and is therefore negligible. However, it's worth rediscovering it even just for that song, one of the best to come out of the Bay in the nineties. 5/10.