ROOTS MANUVA – Oxford Carling Academy, 04/10/08.

Longevity tends to elude most hip hop acts, but Roots Manuva has crept steadily along the musical margins as poppier folk such as Dizzee Rascal and the like have leapt into the spotlight with their chart-humping headaches, quietly amassing a dedicated legion that started with MOBO-bothering debut LP ‘Brand New Secondhand’ in 1999. While most mainstream hip hop acts are either limply protesting art whilst relentlessly pursuing commerce or painting themselves into ever less interesting corners with feverish sampling, Roots Manuva keeps it simple and plays to his strengths. Live, he has gone back to basics, though this is not to suggest that he was basic in the first place – his tumbledown charm and steely resilience pushed back to the fore amidst a sea of classic bump-thumpy beats.

As dub woomphf and icily dispassionate strings come together to form cuts of chillingly catchy cool, a set spanning the highlights of ‘Awfully Deep’ and ‘Run Come Save Me’ keep the crowd bubbling as the man known to his mother as Rodney Smith stalks the stage. New single ‘Buff Nuff’ may be a messy 8-bit stab at the charts that sounds as dissonant as the inside a motorbike helmet seconds after a head-on collision but the rest of ‘Slime & Reason’ still showcases enough evidence of Roots Manuva’s throaty rhetoric and zeitgeist-rogering beats to ensure his significance. Elsewhere, ‘Dreamy Days’ couldn’t be gurning any harder if it removed its false teeth and entered a whimsical seaside competition, bringing a woozy urban ambience to the leafy shires of Oxford.

Live, ol’ Rootsy doesn’t attempt to go anywhere you don’t expect him to, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. ‘Witness (1 Hope)’ is still a tremulous bass squelch of stairwell funk that sounds singular and rallying and ‘Too Cold’ a forgotten chunk of loopy chatterbang like sounds like Stringer Bell flailing around an orchestra pit. In a room full of nodding heads, it’s mission accomplished for Roots Manuva.