The Roots: Rising Down

Yesterday we went to Philly for the Rising Down listening party.

Where to begin. First of the event itself was nice. Good food, quite a few familiar faces, etc But the real reason we were there was to hear the album

*sigh*

It's a good album. A strong album. The Roots seem to pride themselves of thinking outside the box. Their music, though always undeniably hip hop, is never a compilation of what everyone else is doing. You tend to get what happens when you have a group of extremely talented individuals working together to come up with a finished project: either a masterpiece or crap. This album falls somewhere in the middle. Black Thought is, as usual, on point. There are songs on the new album that i LOVE (see the last track featuring Wale) while the ones that I don't like just irritate the hell out of me. There's no question about whether I'll buy the album. I just don't think it lives up to the "Better than Things Fall Apart" hype.