Released as his
Dipset crew were reuniting with an Interscope deal in tow,
Capo finds
Jim Jones a bit distracted, but after his ambitious 2009 effort, Pray IV Reign, it’s a relief to have an album that doesn’t feature an off-Broadway production tie-in.
Capo is scattered and scrappy, which for
Jones is a comfortable landscape where oddball, sprawling, day-in-the-life numbers (“Let Me Fly”) can sit next to stay-on-the-grind tracks (“Deep Blue”), and
Black Eyed Peas-parodies (“Perfect Day” ) with no apologies required. Add a poppin’ bottles anthem like “The Paper” with its “We Fly High”-like chorus, and the more casual
Diplomats fan is satisfied, and with
Cam’ron dropping plenty of strange cheese-and-France references on “Gettin’ to the Money” while
Jones does the thugging, the mixtape faithful have a reason to crawl up from the underground. Big surprise is that the
Wyclef collaboration actually works, and when you get the right combination of posse members (
Chink Santana,
Rell) and outside influences (
Raekwon,
Lloyd Banks,
the Game) to fill in the rest, you’ve got a
Jones album that falls on the better half of his discography. ~ David Jeffries