Earthly Wounds
On his ninth full length album Bleeds, Roots Manuva sounds exhausted—and reasonably so. Not only has the emcee clocked over 21 years developing and defining UK hip-hop, its clear the dismal state of domestic and global affairs have taken its toll on him. One is not want for things to be exhausted by in 2015—global poverty, persisting prejudices, an increasingly destabilized environment, and so on and so on. But while there is quite a bit of compelling material on Bleeds, this sense of wariness too often blurs Manuva’s messaging, leaving his intent difficult to decipher.
The pounding and mournful “Hard Bastards” sets the tone for Bleeds. Between the sorrow-drenched melodies of the chorus, Manuva prophesies that “things are getting bleak, we ain’t seen the worst / Kids are having kids, kids that will never work,” and speaks of the “cheap food and cheap booze that keeps them out of shape.” From there, “Crying”—an unsettling track consisting of a dystopic beat, samples of children whimpering, and lines like “What I mean what I meant to mean is this world cannot be trusted / When I look inside my head and find it so disgusting,”—maintains the apocalyptic demeanor. Later, over the weeping string section of “I Know Your Face,” Manuva spits arcane bars about crash landing into comas and hands that “chop and cut” his still-living body (“I Know Your Face”). It all carries significant emotional weight, but even devotees of depressive music may find Bleeds a bit too heavy handed.
Still, glimpses of light—of both the sun and black variety—manage to break through the malaise. “Don’t Breath Out” hosts a beautiful and strange psyche-funk backdrop for Manuva to express his relationship to God. “Me Up!” is another song about faith, but features a sensual beat and bizarre, pitch-shifted hook proclaiming “She hold me like some weed and now she’s smoking me whole.”
But despite its relatively slight run time of 41 minutes, Bleeds can still be a difficult record to get through. It’s chilly, fatigued hospice music; these are songs for a dying world and dying societies. When he sings “Sometimes it feels like fighting for wasting away” on closer “Fighting For,” Manuva sounds like a man who has witnessed enough of his species’ horrors to effectively maintain faith in the physical. Hope comes from his faith in spiritual transfiguration. It’s a lengthy and wearying wait to get to that point, but when he squints, he can see a pinhole of light squeezing through the darkness.
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