Camu Tao - King Of Hearts

 “In many ways this is a record of what could have been, a snapshot of an artist mid-evolution.” (El-P)

Camu Tao’s first and sadly last solo record, King Of Hearts, is - as alluded to above - a patched-together, posthumous tribute to a burgeoning talent. Columbus, Ohio rapper and producer Tao died two weeks shy of his 31st birthday in May 2008 after losing a year-plus-long battle with lung cancer, a fight he’d been given just two weeks to survive. A long-time associate of the most important hip-hop label of the last decade, Definitive Jux, he had worked with RJD2 as part of the MHz crew; Aesop Rock, Cage and El-P in The Weathermen and Shia LaBeouf’s best bud Cage again as The Nighthawks. Started in 2005, King Of Hearts was initially supposed to be a long-overdue first solo foray. Finally completed five years later by Central Services partner EL-P, what should have signalled the emergence of a serious player instead provides a frustratingly fitting farewell.

Posthumous releases can inevitably lack cohesion, but here - owing to the “mid-evolution” El-P refers to - things are particularly all over the shop. Tao sounds like Elvis Costello (seriously!) to begin with, an oddity that makes more sense when you realise that track four’s entitled ‘My Funny Valentine’. He quickly enters Kool Keith/Del the Funky Homosapien territory on the futuristic, sci-fi sounding ‘Get At You’ and ‘Ind of the Worl’, before the album’s title track throws in a pop hook or three, ‘Major Team’ switches to plain ol’ banging hip-hop anthem mode and ‘Play O Run’ nods in the direction of N*E*R*D who, back then, were still cutting a few edges. ‘The Perfect Plan’ wouldn’t even sound drastically out of place on André 3000's The Love Below. Indeed, first realised just two years after the Outkast man’s opus, you could argue that this collection suggests Camu Tao was well on his way to becoming the André of the underground.

Changing direction at almost every turn does make for dizzying listening, and Tao is far better on the rougher ‘Plot A Little’ than the softer ‘Play O Run’, but as El-P continues in his introduction to the record: “You don’t need to see the invention fully realized to recognize the magnitude of the creative force behind the sketches.” King Of Hearts’ sketches reveal a force breaking away from decidedly underground roots in every way possible, showing a number of snapshots of what could have been in the process. It makes his loss all the more galling, but this release all the more important. Essential listening for any hip-hop fan.