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Big K.R.I.T. Return of 4Eva // Big KRIT is the talented progeny of Southern hip hop godfathers like Bun B and Big Boi.  The man is hungry as a starving dog, respectful as a good Christian boy, and knowledgeable as a hip hop archeologist.  Basically, KRIT is everything you want in an up and coming star.  The man can do car culture (“Rotation”) and stereo systems (“My Sub”) as well as he can do mama tributes (“Free My Soul”) and soul searching (“Another Naive Individual . . .”).  At 21 full tracks, Return of 4Eva is perhaps too long in the tooth, but there’s just so much to like on this album that it’s pointless to focus on what doesn’t work.  ”R4 Theme Song” repurposes the stuttering “forever-eva-eva” from Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson” into an anthemic chorus that guides KRIT throughout the record; it’s essentially a portrait of modest success that comes through hard work, a trope that gets repeated often over the course of the album (“Dreamin’,” “American Rapstar,” “Free My Soul”).  Elsewhere, the effortlessly charming “Rotation” and “My Sub” are harmless backyard party fodder with solid beats and tight rhymes.  Lyrically, KRIT isn’t the most versatile rapper: you get the sense that he’s perhaps too literal of a thinker to be able to construct complex extended metaphors.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that his virtuosity comes entirely from his flow and not his verbal dexterity.  Who knows if KRIT will put out an official album in the next couple of years, but it would be a shame if KRIT was stuck toiling away in the mixtape trade without a real shot at a wider audience.  Rating: 7.5 / 10

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Fabolous The Soul Tape // A couple of years ago, a group of friends (and friends of friends) tried to form a mixtape exchange.  Each week someone would be in charge of curating a mixtape for the group.  My first entry was a tape that collected hip hop songs that used soul samples.  I am still immensely proud of that tape because it boldly paired everyone from UGK to J-Live to Lil Wayne.  So, when I heard that Fabolous had released a mixtape of his own raps over other tracks that sampled soul song, I snatched it up immediately.  I haven’t followed Fabolous’ career close enough to rank this among other albums or mixtapes, but I know enough to say Fab’s liquidy flow sounds great over soulful tracks from everyone from Nas to Tupac to Kanye.  On the established tracks, especially “Mo Brooklyn, Mo Harlem, Mo Southside” and “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” Fabolous appropriates a singularly memorable beat and twists the original meaning of the song into something personal and original.  For example, Fabolous turns Kanye’s ultra-smooth fame-lament “Devil in a New Dress” into his own struggle with the trials of celebrity (such as it is for him).  But it’s the tracks that feature original production that really steal the show.  Sonaro’s beat on “Leaving You” is exquisite: a tight trap guides a beat that crashes with a sparkling broken glass sample and what sounds a lot like a plucked string section.  And the strings and death knells of “Y’all Don’t Know Me Tho” give Fab enough momentum to deliver his most impassioned raps.  In the end, The Soul Tape isn’t a comeback big and it isn’t a placeholder until the next album.  No, The Soul Tape exists simply for its own conceit: a collection of witty raps witty raps over soulfully smooth beats.  If I had this in my possession years ago, I would have felt comfortable forwarding the entire record to my mixtape crew.  Rating: 7 / 10

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Pusha T Fear of God // As one half of nihilistic thrillers Clipse, Pusha T has mastered the art of slinging rhymes with all the bravado of a coke don.  His rhymes are always fiercely tight and his flow is pure vocal liquefaction.  But without Malice and without The Neptunes’ sleek minimalistic production, Pusha sometimes gets overwhelmed by his surroundings.  As a general rule, the most more gaudily baroque beats nearly envelope Pusha’s surprisingly delicate lyricism.  For example, his freestyle over Lil Wayne’s “Money on My Mind” or “Feeling Myself” are simply too much for Pusha’s languid flow.  But that only means that the tracks with the sparest tracks are the most successful.  ”Cook It Down” relies on a crisp snare and a mournful organ and Pusha soars: he makes his competitors “walk like their 30 years is right around the corner.”  And just as solid is his freestyle over Jay-Z’s jazzy classic “Can I Live.”  He tosses away brilliant metaphors and turns of phrase that otherwise get lost in the fuller numbers:  ”They say I talk coke for 9 years long/That means my rap sheet is more than 9 years strong/You niggas would have thought that I was 9 years gone/But I am still in the mix like 9 ounces and a straw.”  Pusha T’s lyricism has always been his strongest suite, and it’s definitely on display on Fear of God; you just have to know where to look.  Rating: 6.5 / 10

The thing that made 2010 such a remarkable year was the fact that the democratization of taste (thank you, internet) has continued unabated.  Everyone has the same access to every album, every artist, every song.  It’s in no way weird to like both Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and Salem’s “King Night.”  And with this, genre distinctions are becoming increasingly meaningless.  The balkanization of genre into ever-smaller units of sounds and artists means that they tend to less impactful and more ephemeral.  It’s no coincidence, then, that the best albums of the year were the albums that played with your genre expectations.  You wanted a funky hipster throwdown with LCD Soundsystem?  Tough luck pal, here’s the best record that David Bowie never got around to writing.  Kanye West wrote an emotionally devastating album that barely features a potential radio hit; Crystal Castles recorded the best punk rock album by completing ignoring guitars.  Here We Go Magic tried to resurrect motorik-driven Krautrock for the masses, and How to Dress Well casually re-invented 50 years of R&B tradition with a 4-track machine and some spare time.  And the most recognizable DJ of our time is a goofy guy who simply holds a mirror up to our culture so we can see it for all its strange glory.  But this has been the story of popular music for the past decade, and this is not a new thesis.  I’m just thankful to be living in the most productive, most generous era of pop music in history.  More people are doing more awesome things than ever before.  Here’s the proof: forty albums that were stunning and disquieting, revelatory and cathartic, destructive and piercing, redemptive and exhilarating.

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Big K.R.I.T. – K.R.I.T. Wuz Here The hype around Big K.R.I.T.’s debut mixtape K.R.I.T. Wuz Here has been a pretty ridiculous.  Mixtapes (let alone rap albums) are almost never perfect; the density of the music makes it much better suited to singles.  And the chances of this relatively untested upstart releasing one of the best hip hop albums of the year seemed far-fetched.  Eating crow is easy when you’ve got Big KRIT. keeping you company.  K.R.I.T. carefully balances the push-and-pull between his southern-friend trunk-rattlers like “Country Shit” and the reflective thought experiments like “Hometown Heroes.”  And, strangely, he’s at his best when he fully commits to one or the other of the personas.  “Country Shit” is a chest-beating banger filled with regional pride that elevates K.R.I.T. to the arena of the best Southern rappers rep’ing the landmass below the Mason-Dixon.  But quickly, he can turn on a dime and heart your heart with tear-jerkers like “Children of the World” (which features a fantastic closing acapella rap) or “As Small as a Giant.”  It’s such a pleasure to watch K.R.I.T. balances these tendencies, but it’s even more pleasurable to realize that you’re listening to the ascendancy of a potentially great rapper.  And while the tape is far from perfect (there are a few forgettable songs here), the bulk of it justifies the hype. Rating:  7.5 / 10

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Kompakt generally releases electronic music for people who are uncomfortable with electronic music.  Their artists tend to create warmly digital environments where genre considerations and sample identification don’t much matter.  Walls might be a quintessentially Kompakt kind of duo: pop ambient for people with no patience for pop or ambient.  It’s tempting, then, to say that Walls is a great uniter, but the truth is that this one will probably struggle to find its core audience because, in effect, it has no core audience.  On the whole, the album is a soup of formless ingredients: guitar drones, sparkling synthesizers, vague microbeats.  Approachable enough to extent a hand to electronic novices, but also simple enough to discourage electronic experts.  To make matters even worse, none of it quite stays with you after you’ve spent a half hour listening to it.  But if you’re willing to let it hang around your headphones on lazy afternoons, then I’m sure you’ll find more than enough to love about this strange little album. [mp3]  Rating:  7 / 10

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Blackbird Blackbird – Blackbird Blackbird At this point, I think I’ve made my feelings very clear about Mikey Sanders and his excellent Blackbird Blackbird project.  For his debut album (which you can download/purchase here or here), Sanders collects some of the great songs that announced him to the world, including “Happy High,” “Pure,” and “Avalanche.”  The album, though, isn’t a quite recycle job.  There’s enough new material here to warrant throwing down a few bones for the pleasure.  Among these new songs is the titular “Summer Heart,” a song that feels nostalgic and wise and melancholy and hopeful all at the same time. Aside from his ability to write unbelievable hooks, this tendency to create enough layers of sentiment that his songs often feel like emotional phyllo dough has been Sanders’ core strength.  While some of the songs feel out of place (“So Sorry, Girl” feels too distinct with its pop sensibility to contribute to the whole), this is an excellent first album from someone who, if there’s any justice in the universe, we will be listening to for a while.  Rating:  8 / 10