The Roots
How I Got Over
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Def Jam
Throughout their career, the Roots have seemingly found more freedom by avoiding the typical clichés of hip-hop and the talents of each individual member of the group have enabled the band to explore this freedom easily. Without being tied to drum machines or pitch-shifting or common BPMs, the Roots created a heady, darker sound with few peers. In this regard, the much-anticipated How I Got Over doesn’t change course in a way that’s immediately noticeable and instead follows the rest of the band’s Def Jam output in a way that feels natural. Like its two predecessors, How I Got Over begins as a somber, reflective work, its tracks merging with one another without hiccups or second thoughts, only the alien voices of the bulk of Dirty Projectors giving any indication that things have changed.
Make no mistake, How I Got Over is the same Roots fans have always loved but things are significantly different beneath the surface. How I Got Over is an album by a band making concessions it hasn’t before, exploring paths that were always available but nonetheless were left alone. It’s in the credits, the appearances by the likes of Joanna Newsom, the Monsters of Folk and the aforementioned Dirty Projectors. The Roots have never needed samples, which hasn’t stopped them from occasionally using them, but on How I Got Over, it feels as though the band has let their guests crowd the field, shackling the group in a way that samples, drum machines and synths have handicapped lesser acts.
Guest appearances are, of course, nothing new to the Roots’ discography, but How I Got Over finds the band playing with friends on almost every single outing, with the exception of two instrumental tracks that last less than a minute. Often they augment the songs, but the sheer quantity of guests is hard not to perceive as a lack of confidence by the band in their own abilities. Tellingly, the moments where the guests are used like puzzle pieces, or even as organic samples of a sort, are the strongest on the album, such as the way Newsom brings a haunting innocence to the already sublime “Right On” and John Legend adds an ethereal cool to the edges of “The Fire.”
Elsewhere, though, are tracks like “The Day” which finds Patty Crash doing her best Dido imitation and nearly ruining an otherwise tightly structured atmospheric journal piece. Worse is “Dear God 2.0,” structured as it is around the Monsters of Folk mostly doing their best imitation of Wings-era Paul McCartney at his mopiest. In the cases of both these songs, the guest vocals at best add nothing and at worst, threaten to derail the effort altogether. The veteran Roots collaborators, namely Dice Raw, fare better and tend to work towards the benefit of the track rather than themselves. Dice Raw is perhaps How I Got Over’s MVP, letting his vocals channel Curtis Mayfield on the album’s title track and “Now or Never,” both of which could compete for the strongest songs on the album.
How I Got Over is by no means a failure, it’s a strong, incredibly cohesive work and there’s the rub- if an album is as strong as this and its missteps aren’t even quantifiable, is it fair to judge it to standards that may not even be achievable? Probably not, but at the same time, it’s impossible to divorce the Roots from the notion that the band has made its name on its unwillingness to take the easy way at any point. The simple truth is that within the canon of the Roots, How I Got Over unfortunately feels a little disappointing. It’s unfortunately filled to the brim with often unnecessary guests, it ends abrasively with two tracks that are tonal mismatches for everything that came before and most devastatingly, the bulk of its tracks find the Roots sounding as though they’ve lost the freedom they enjoyed away from the constraints of their genre.
by Morgan Davis
