Q-Tip - Kamaal the Abstract

Rating: * * * *

Q-Tip, one of the king-pins of New York hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest in the late 80s and 90s, first came up with the idea for this freaky hip-hop Bitches Brew-style album in the late 90s.

Back then he was over the commercialised and mostly misogynistic hip-hop that was the norm and decided to do something entirely different as a follow-up to his classic 1999 solo debut, Amplified. However, after Kamaal the Abstract was recorded in 2001 his record company shelved it because it didn't think it was commercial enough.

Good thing he came up with something timeless then - and nine years on it sounds fresh, inventive and cosmic.

Kamaal the Abstract is hip-hop soul jazz with a few fuzzy, psychedelic guitar licks thrown in too, like on the opening bars of first track Feelin'. Oddly enough though it's the flute, which flits between fawning and feisty, on sloping seven-minute epic, Do You Dig U?, that steals the show.

Barely Love is where things start getting a little more fruity and frenetic, with its hand-claps, clavinet keys, and Q-Tip singing like a lucid, Lovesexy-era Prince; and just as weird is the mad noodling of Heels, the yabbering rhyming rap of Abstractionisms, and A Million Times reveals hints of Q-Tip's past playfulness.

It's a shame it wasn't released in the early 2000s, but there's a unique coolness to it and it still sounds ahead of its time in 2009.

Scott Kara