Album Review: Campilation by Camper

The producer assembles R&B royalty for a family reunion album. Sadly, the talented guests can’t save songs stuck on one emotional note. The album mistakes proximity to greatness for greatness itself.

Courtesy of November Yellow/SLANG.

There’s a particular gamble when a producer tries to turn their phone contacts into a family portrait. You stack enough names on a tracklist and the gravity shifts, then suddenly it’s not about what any one song is doing, it’s about the fact that all these people showed up for you. The DJ Khaled model. The problem is that model runs on event energy, on the novelty of pairings, on hooks so massive they paper over anything else. When you try it in R&B, where the whole point is supposed to be feeling something, the math gets harder. You need the songs to actually hold.

Darhyl Camper Jr.—who goes by Camper now, having dropped the DJ—has spent nearly two decades building credits that would make most producers retire satisfied. He executive-produced H.E.R.’s self-titled debut, the one that won the Grammy. He co-wrote Coco Jones’ “ICU,” which became one of those songs that soundtracks every corner of the internet for a full calendar year. He’s worked with everyone from Brandy to Big Sean to Usher. So when he announced Campilation as a compilation album featuring “all the R&B artists I love that’s my family,” it sounded like a coronation. The roster backs it up with Stevie Wonder on harmonica, Brandy singing leads, Jill Scott trading verses with Ty Dolla $ign, Victoria Monét closing the whole thing out, and others.

Instead of making things great, the album has a lexicon problem. Across these tracks, the artists keep cycling through the same content and concepts about demanding answers, waiting for someone to come through, issuing ultimatums, apologizing in ways that don’t actually repair anything. On “Tonight,” Camper and Lucky Daye ask to “hold each other accountable” and plead for someone to “tell me, tell me, what are we on.” On “Back and Forth,” he teams up with Brandy, who wants to know where everything went wrong: “Tell me something, say something, tell me something.” On “Speak to Me,” backed by a co-production by Terrace Martin, the entire composition, with the help of Arin Ray, is basically “speak to me” and “let’s make it work.” On “Waiting on You,” Tone Stith does exactly what the title says, over and over, for two and a half minutes that should’ve been an interlude. Everyone on this album is asking for clarity they never get.

The most revealing song might be “Love Me,” where Camper himself steps up to sing by himself. It’s built around a single ultimatum: “It’s either you love me, or you don’t.” That’s the whole thesis, repeated until it becomes the only thought in the room. Stevie Wonder shows up to play a harmonica outro, which should elevate the moment into something transcendent, but the song has already said everything it’s going to say by the second chorus. There’s no development, no complication, no room for the other person to respond. Just a binary that keeps restating itself.

That narrowness runs through most of the album. “Come Over” has WanMor trying to poach someone out of their current relationship (“When you’re with him, you be thinking of me”) with the confidence of a man who’s already decided the outcome. “I Need It,” featuring Syd and Tank, treats desire as a kind of emergency, all urgency and no patience. Tank’s verse, in particular, leans hard into ownership language, the “don’t run away from daddy” school of seduction that sounds increasingly dated. Even “War,” which has Ari Lennox and Jeremih trading devotion anthems about going to battle for love, can’t find a register beyond declaration. Jeremih sings “for your love I’ll go to war” enough times that the metaphor loses all its weight.

The album’s best moments are the ones that slow down and let ambivalence breathe. “Sixteen Summers,” featuring Alex Isley and Rose Gold, is a genuine standout—Isley searching for a love from sixteen years ago, admitting she still doesn’t know anything like it. Rose Gold’s verse captures the confusion of being broken by someone and grateful for them at the same time: “Sometimes you break it and leave it where it’s laying, and put it back together again.” That’s a real thought, one that acknowledges the mess of long attachment. “Love You,” the Victoria Monét closer, works because it refuses the album’s dominant logic of possession: “I don’t have to have you to love you.” It’s the one moment where someone on this record sounds free.

But two songs (three for Lucky as a bonus) can’t rescue a project that keeps defaulting to the same emotional carriage. The features are uniformly strong. Nobody here phones it in, but they’re all working with material that doesn’t ask much of them. Jill Scott, one of the most distinctive voices in R&B history, spends her time on “OOWEE” riffing about weed strains. Again, Brandy brings her full instrument to “Back and Forth” and still ends up circling around “tell me something” like it’s the only line in the script. The talent is undeniable. The writing isn’t.

Camper clearly loves these artists, and they clearly showed up for him. But Campilation mistakes assembly for vision. A compilation needs a through-line stronger than “these are my people.” It needs songs that justify putting all these voices in the same room. What it delivers instead is a holding pattern in a multitude of ways, on asking someone to decide, to come over, to speak, to love you, or not. Nobody ever gets an answer, but maybe that’s the point. However, it makes for an album that talks and talks without ever really saying anything.

Above Average (★★★☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Tonight,” “Sixteen Summers,” “Love You”