Biography
When Rodney Smith aka Roots Manuva began work on the album which was to become ?Awfully Deep,? he never expected to make the best part of thirty tracks. But that?s how it worked out. Furthermore, he had insisted that he didn?t want his new record to be more than twelve or thirteen tracks long. The solution? A year on from releasing one of the best and most critically-acclaimed albums of 2005, Big Dada/Banana Klan are putting out a mid-price collection of the best of these additional tracks. Some have been used as downloads or B sides or exclusives, some have never been released before, but this is the best way to be sure of having them all. Plus, it turns out, Roots Manuva always makes not just good tracks, but remarkably good albums? ?Alternately Deep? is the same record as ?Awfully Deep? transported to an alternate universe. Much more raw and stripped down, many of the underlying themes are the same, but dealt with in different ways. Collaborators here are grime producer Jammer, Lotek, Colossus, Easy Access Orchestra and live vocal partner Ricky Ranking, but, as ever, the record is definitively the work of Roots Manuva, a fine addition to a remarkable body of releases.
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