Four minutes of the album’s brief half-hour running time consist of “found” audio snippets that contribute to the album’s haunting, melancholy tone. The disc starts with Nina Simone singing the theme from the film Middle of the Night. The angular melody, dissonant background strings and Simone’s nervous, vibrato-laden voice establishes a menacing presence that continues with Mary Lou Williams’ “The Devil,” an excerpt that ends with the telling lyric, “The devil looks a lot like you and I.” A snippet of experimental music, Michael Chion’s “Dies Irae,” pushes the Roots into the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” territory, its moment of sonic chaos reinforcing the record’s themes of death and desperation.