A Little Deeper

When Niomi Daley burst onto the London scene in 2001 as Ms. Dynamite, she released a series of singles that endeared her to the city’s emergent grime and garage heads. Most notable of these was “Booo!”: a hard-edged garage burner produced by Richard “Sticky” Forbes. But her major-label debut, A Little Deeper, found her going in quite a different direction. A Little Deeper almost entirely discards the harsh electronic overtones of Ms. Dynamite’s early singles in favor of a highly burnished retro-soul aesthetic. Garage diehards cried "sellout," but Ms. Dynamite’s stylistic change-up garnered both commercial and critical dividends: A Little Deeper became one of 2002's more fêted releases and won Ms. Dynamite the esteemed Mercury Music Prize at year’s end. Though it sometimes suffers from overproduction, A Little Deeper is indeed a remarkable album that deserves its many accolades. Particularly interesting is “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee,” a triumphant statement of purpose that finds Ms. Dynamite crooning about her heady days on the garage circuit over an elegantly looped reggae sample.