After emerging six years ago as the South’s quintessential regular joes with the single “Awnaw,” and five years after their equally down-home but less commercially successful second album, Nappy Roots return, trying to reconcile hard times with their desire for a more garish lifestyle. On the synth-laden “Swerve & Lean,” the Kentucky crew shows a penchant for flossing, while “Tinted Up” finds Big V boasting that his car window is “dark enough to have Obama in it.” Unfortunately, this crisis in ideology means that their few attempts at, well, rootsiness (“Small Towns”) come off as a bit beleaguered.
