KEN TRAN, Out of Camo

The reality of war rarely sounds the way it appears from a distance. On Out of Camo, Ken Tran strips away the ceremonial language of military service and replaces it with something far more unsettling: the voices of veterans confronting what happens after the uniform comes off. Blending spoken-word poetry with atmospheric production, subtle rhythms, choral textures and cinematic soundscapes, Tran has created an unusually immersive meditation on war’s psychological, racial and generational costs—and one that deserves serious consideration in the Spoken Word Album field.

The title track immediately establishes the album’s distinctive language. Offbeat shakers and a slow tribal pulse accompany Tran’s reflective narration about leaving military life behind, while elegant piano harmonies lend warmth to his uncertainty. As the percussion intensifies, the repeated “left, right, left, right” becomes a haunting military mantra, eventually giving way to rising female harmonies, wind and the sound of a closing door. The music seems to enact the transition from command to uncertainty.

That tension deepens on “Adrift,” where soulful piano and a brooding bass foundation surround Tran’s confession that his identity was left on the shore. Female voices echo “adrift” and “hollow and unseen,” turning private disorientation into something almost ritualistic. “Adversity” takes that idea into more rhythmic territory, pairing eerie synths, bass and gospel-inflected vocals with Tran’s questioning of the double life created by joining the military. His rhyming phrases—“Uncertainty, service and ability, searching for my identity”—give the piece an almost rap-like musicality.

The album becomes especially searing on “Black Under Fire,” featuring Mac Woods, which connects military sacrifice to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of Greenwood. Over strings, beats, mystical synths, guitar and gospel-like vocal responses, Woods delivers an incendiary portrait of a Black soldier who survives German gunfire only to confront American racial violence at home. The devastating line about Tulsa having “a Tulsa dialect” of bullets crystallizes the track’s central horror: coming home did not necessarily mean leaving war behind.

Elsewhere, “Letter to a Moving Target,” featuring Mike Guinn, uses strange, sharp percussive accents and breathy echoes beneath an intensely charged address about Black struggle and survival. “The Veteran,” led by Erika Renee Land, is even more intimate, her increasingly breathless delivery embodying the fracture between the woman she was and the soldier the Army created. “Interlude: The Cost of War” turns her declaration that war costs “too damn high” into a public protest chant.

The album’s final stretch becomes quieter but no less devastating. “Purpose” discovers meaning in ordinary civilian moments; “Remorse Code” connects military trauma across generations through thunder, guitar and a prayer-like spoken cadence; and “Memory” examines how yesterday refuses to stay buried. On “Home,” Guinn’s hypnotic synths and thick rhythmic pulse surround a desperate collective plea to return—not merely to a geographical place, but to a life beyond armor. Finally, “Silence” leaves the listener amid rain, wind, heartbeat and spacious synths, connecting military experience to childhood, family loss and the need to forge belonging.

Out of Camo is not easy listening, nor is it supposed to be. It is poetry, testimony, protest and musical theater of the mind, with Deuandra T. Brown’s evocative compositions giving each narrator a distinct emotional landscape. Most importantly, Tran refuses to romanticize service or simplify those who serve. He allows pride, regret, trauma, racism, loyalty, confusion and hope to coexist. The result is a profoundly human anti-war statement—and a striking demonstration of how poetry, rhythm and sound can transform lived experience into art without softening its truth.