Roots Manuva v.s Wrongtom - Duppywriter

Roots Manuva v.s Wrongtom - Duppywriter

09 September, 2010
by: Trol23

Tomas Olesen gets stuck with the new LP from Wrongtom and Roots Manuva for a week...without any ill effects!

It's the mark of a good album when you can listen to it again and again without tedium. This latest outing on Big Dada from Wrongtom had the dubious pleasure of accompanying me on a trip to Outlook festival in Croatia recently and although the cover now looks slightly tired, the music inside certainly isn't. Having spent the best part of eight days in a hire car with no other CD and only Croatian folk as an alternative on the radio (to be fair the Croatian version of the 'Lion Sleeps Tonight' is hilarious) it should be driving me nuts. But it isn't.

Wrongtom is best known as a remixer and bootlegger and as a tour DJ for Hard Fi. Here he's collected his favourite Roots Manuva vocals and remade them in a reggae style. The effect is to make them sound like the originals rather than the remixes. The other effect is to make better tunes of many of them. I have to admit I wasn't a massive fan of 'Buff Nuff' originally but here as a reggae re-rub it shines as one of the album highlights. Other highlights include a fantastic version of 'The World is Mine'. Originally a hidden track on the noodle pack of 'Awfully Deep' it lacked groove and didn't give Roots Manuva's excellent vocals room to groove. Here the vocals drive it, and with a perfectly weighted bass-line following them it’s probably my favourite tune on the album. 'Big Tings Gwidarn', which finds a new lease of life as 'Big Tings Redone', follows as a close second.

The whole thing reminds one of something like Mad Professor’s take on Massive Attack’s 'Protection'. Sure, you could dismiss this as simply a remix album but it stands alone as a great album in its own right and it’s one of those that has you reaching for the play button again as soon as the last bit of warm sub bass has faded out. The single, ‘Jah Warriors’ featuring Ricky Ranking, is a cracking dancefloor-aimed number and the only wholly original track on the album. It’s stripped down and bassy and one can only hope that what Roots Manuva chooses to do next sounds a lot like this.

Wrongtom knows his musical history, and on 'Duppywriter' that translates into a knowing swagger through the golden era of dancechall: from the Roots Radics in their Junjo Lawes era, to Prince Jammy and the birth of digital dancehall. The heritage it draws on is also echoed by the Tony McDermott artwork on the cover. McDemott created some of the most loved reggae sleeve art ever for Greensleeves’ artists like Mad Professor and Scientist and still does.

A duppy is a type of Jamaican spirit or ghost, and as such the implication of Duppywriter is that Wrongtom is acting as a ghostwriter for Roots Manuva. It’s a good analogy. Just as it takes someone very talented to take the words of someone like Katie ‘Jordan’ Price and ghostwrite something that people would actually want to read, it also takes someone very talented to take the poetry of one of the UK’s finest lyricists and duppywrite it into something that often surpasses the original

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Trol23