In the four years since his last album, Roots Manuva, a great curmudgeon of British music who forged his gruff diction in the byways of south London, relocated to genteel Surrey and cultivated an interest in gardening. The move hasn’t altogether softened his temperament: Bleeds opens with a tirade against the free market labels pretty much everybody as bastards. That bitterness resurfaces elsewhere on the album but the urgency, so bracingly misanthropic on Hard Bastards, starts flagging halfway through. Before then, we get two strange, intense productions, Crying and Facety 2:11, which play nicely to the 42-year-old’s eccentricities, and a beautifully idiosyncratic meditation on religious feeling in Don’t Breathe Out.
