Roots reach a creative height in 'undun'

Have the Roots outdone themselves with undun?

Quite possibly. And if the 10th studio album by the Philadelphia hip-hop and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon band is not their best - and, really, the group has worked at such a high level since 1999's Things Fall Apart that choosing one album above all others is a fool's errand - it is in many ways their most ambitious.

undun (Def Jam ***1/2) shares its name with a Guess Who song, but wears its seriousness on its sleeve (the CD or LP sleeve, that is, if you buy the physical product).

Affixed to the cover - which shows New York photographer Jamel Shabazz's 1980 black-and-white photo "Flying High," showing a Brooklyn kid doing a flip onto a pile of beat-up mattresses - is a sticker.

It reads: "undun is an existential re-telling of the life of one Redford Stephens (1972-1999). Through the use of emotives and Redford's internal dialogue, the album seeks to illustrate the intersection of free will and prescribed destiny as it plays out 'on the corner.' "

The phrase "on the corner" is telling, because it refers to where drug deals go down. The Corner is the name of a 2000 mini-series created by David Simon, who went on to create The Wire, the hallowed HBO series that Roots drummer and conceptualist Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson has cited as one of the chief influences on undun.

Who is Redford Stephens? He's a fictional character inspired by Sufjan Stevens, the gifted indie-rock songwriter who included a piano instrumental called "Redford" on his 2003 album Greetings From Michigan.

As if the Roots didn't already have enough cred with indie-rockers after collaborating with Jim James and the Dirty Projectors on their last album, 2010's How I Got Over, Stevens himself shows up to reprise "Redford" on undun. He handles the first section of the four-part instrumental "Redford Suite" that features the violently physical pianist D.D. Jackson, and closes the album with a beautiful and dissonant coda that will sound familiar to anyone who attended ?uestlove's collaboration with French singer Keren Ann at the Kimmel Center in April.

The character Redford Stephens is a composite of "four to five people we know in Philadelphia," ?uestlove told a PBS interviewer last week. And the thinking man's drug dealer was also inspired by Avon Barksdale, the narcotics kingpin in The Wire. Stephens makes fateful decisions that lead to his own undoing, but ?uestlove told PBS, "In my head he always felt like out of all the street-corner guys, his life could have easily turned around within a matter of seconds."

undun begins with Stephens' death, then moves ahead to consider key moments when the darkness closed in. Bringing the character to life is the job of Roots' rapper Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter, though the voices in Stephens' head are given shifting perspectives by an assortment of MCs, including Greg Porn; Truck North; and especially the Roots' longtime secret weapon, Dice Raw.

It might seem as though the listener is in for some pedantic tedium. When the Roots want to clown around, they do it not in the studio but on Fallon. (Last month ?uestlove's subversive streak got him in hot water when the band played Fishbone's "Lyin' Ass B-" as GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachman took the stage. He's since told the website Pitchfork it was "absolutely not" worth it.)

For more on the Redford Stephens backstory, you can go to the undun app (available in the Apple or Android store). But to appreciate the expertly sequenced, stylistically varied, and sharply produced album, one needn't be concerned with all the particulars of its protagonist's existence.

The album begins to gather force with a compelling hook on the third track, "One Time," in which Dice Raw raps: "I wonder when you die do you hear harps and bagpipes / If you born on the other side of the crack pipe?"

The most hauntingly cinematic segment on undun is Black Thought's verse in "I Remember," underpinned by a chorus sung by neo-soul duo Jazzyfatnastees.

"I used to ride the train to the same two stops, and look at the graffiti on the rooftops," Black Thought rhymes. "Like the same song playing on the jukebox / Joint called 'Faded Polaroids in a Shoebox' / Regardless of what the cadence is, it can't be forgotten like old acquaintances / I realize how depressing of a place it is / And when I notice my reflection whose face it is . . . ."

undun is a concept album, for sure. And that sets it apart as a smart, surprise move in the Roots' ever-more-impressive career, in which they keep pushing to creative heights despite a lucrative night job that might allow a less-driven ensemble to take it easy. But the individual songs on undun are rendered with such keen-eyed intelligence and poetic grace by Black Thought, in particular, that they work not only as part of the story, but wholly apart from it as well.