Unsurprisingly perhaps, the most complete-sounding tracks ("Ind of the Worl," "Major Team") are the ones on which he most returns to traditional rapping, but perhaps it's better to look, as comparison, to the EP he completed with El-P in 2005 under the name Central Services, but which wasn't released until just before King of Hearts.
He was studying the classics ("Death" references Phil Spector, and "Fonny Valentine" is a less-than-subtle play on the Rodgers & Hart standard) and testing out new phrasing (the triplets of "Play O Run"), but he's also still finding his voice as a singer, and as a pop songwriter, figuring out where repetition and muddied lyrics work and where they don't. But these fragments can - and should - be understood as incomplete, because it's clear that Camu Tao, even if he wasn't quite there yet, knew what he was doing, and what he wanted to do. Instead, all we have to build our impression from are the literal bits and pieces of songs: some without verses ("Bird Flu"), some without production ("Fuck Me"), some practically interludes ("Intervention," "Actin A Ass"). Many of the songs are unfinished, although unlike Biggie's Life After Death, Dilla's Donuts, or even Jeff Buckley's Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (all posthumous or nearly posthumous albums), Camu doesn't have the first solo record(s) already in the bag to give fans a reference point. But even taken as is, it's clear that Camu was interested in pushing boundaries and melding genres, both for him and hip-hop itself - as anyone who's heard his 2001 single "Hold the Floor," he's a more than able MC - and the record succeeds because of this willingness to experiment.
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