Capo

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.