Snoop Dogg - Ego Trippin' (Geffen)

Snoop Dogg

Ego Trippin' (Geffen)

In the 15-plus years since the initial, untouchable team-up of Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre, Snoop has never found another collaborator of comparable suitability. But Ego Trippin', Snoop's ninth major label album, features the engineering of DJ Quik and Teddy Riley's musical supervision. It's a dream team to drool over - on paper at least. Lead single "Sensual Seduction" is an undeniable masterpiece of throwback funk schmaltz (complete with pimpadelic Dogg-in-furs video) that proves Snoop is a better singer than Andre 3000. Obvious follow-up "Gurls" rides a haute chop of the Bee Gee's "Too Much Heaven" while Snoop brags, "I'm about to beat the cat up like Heathcliff."

Real talk is harder to come by. "I never fucked Superhead or Kim Kardashian," Snoop claims on "What Eva You Do," while on the Rick Rock-produced synth-storm of "Stack in My Jeans" he notes, "One time I told a bitch not to come back 'til she got two-thousand dollars in two-dollar bills." Quik's precision sonic mechanics are utterly eargasmic, and Riley's talkbox-strafed production makes "Snoop Dogg Is Out" a sure-fire money shot. Yet Snoop's predictable and unwavering blunts 'n' bitches script makes you long for the menace of Murda Was the Case - or even the family-friendly homilies of his hit reality show Fatherhood. - Peter Relic

Autechre - Quaristice (Warp)

Autechre

Quaristice (Warp)

Quaristice is Autechre's ninth album and serves as yet another testament to its 20-year legacy as quintessential arbiters of Intelligent Dance Music. It's a genre that must certainly be a strange one to captain. Its early existence as a sort of electronic oddity has since seen IDM relegated to headphone-wearing electronic music purists. The work of Rob Brown and Sean Booth has seemingly touched every iteration of the genre at some point in their careers, and this is yet another album full of almost impenetrable IDM. But instead of each track averaging eight minutes in length, these 20 cuts tend to skew much shorter, but rest assured - the song titles still give Microsoft Word's spell check function fits.

Opening cut "Altibzz" starts Quaristice off on an almost ambient note before tracks like "The Plc," "plyPhon" and "chenc9" return the album to the skitterish, driving beats that the band is known for. "Simmm" is probably the album's most eclectic track - in the span of five minutes, it shifts from a melodically striking opening passage to an ambient middle, complete with a clattering ruckus of bleeps and squelches. The backwards voice masking in "IO" sounds positively sinister, especially during the moments that it's accompanied by a tinny organ beat. Slight variations on that theme - from the collage feel of "Fol3," to the abrupt starts and stops of "Steels," or the Asian strings of "Theswere" - occur throughout the album. Quaristice does come full circle, however. Closing tracks "Notwo" and "Outh9X" serve as the comedown, as Autechre slowly drifts away into binary bliss. - Jeremy Willets

Kathleen Edwards

Kathleen Edwards - Asking for Flowers (Zoe/Rounder)

Asking for Flowers (Zoe/Rounder)

It's not particularly difficult for an artist in any genre to move the sonic needle from loud to soft, from rockers to ballads, from bombast to subtlety. The really tricky maneuver is to ride the tension between those extremes and find that rare pocket where power and vulnerability are presented simultaneously. Warren Zevon, with an innate ability to rock, laugh or cry his ass off, could have written a manual about it, Freedy Johnston could revise it and Kathleen Edwards is well on her way to penning a couple of meaty chapters all her own.

Edwards' 2003 debut, Failer, captivated nearly everyone who heard it and it was a staple of Top 10 lists that year. Somehow, 2005's Back to Me didn't quite live up to the critical expectations of its predecessor (note that last statement's dripping sarcasm regarding Edwards' most excellent sophomore outing; there might have been a half-dozen better songs than "In State" and "Summerlong" that year). With Asking for Flowers, there can be no quibbling over details - Edwards has produced her delicately driven masterpiece. Edwards cranks out songs that perfectly complement her voice and guitar, banged-up instruments that rasp with indignation, crack with emotion and soar with exultant joy. Edwards rocks with tremulous authority on the brilliant swagger of "The Cheapest Key," featuring a bridge that simmers for just a moment before exploding ("Don't get me wrong/Here comes my softer side/And there it goes ..."), then shatters hearts into uncountable pieces with "Alicia Ross," a wrenching first-person elegy to a murdered Toronto girl ("Was your darkest day as dark as this one?"). Those best moments are matched throughout Asking for Flowers, from the Springsteen-esque "Oil Man's War" to the Emmylou-Lucinda ramble of "Run" and the Crazy Horse squall of "Oh Canada." Attention 2008 Top 10 listers: One down, nine to go. - Brian Baker

Del The Funky Homosapien

11th Hour (Definitive Jux)

Del The Funky Homosapien - 11th Hour (Definitive Jux)

While Del may be best known for his featured-artist status on albums by Gorillaz and Handsome Boy Modeling School, he's had a long, praiseworthy solo career that's taken him from his early days of De La Soul meets G-Funk to the futuristic sci-fi opera of Deltron 3030. Through it all, he rapped with a bizarre playfulness, often switching his cadence while mixing multi-syllabic vocabulary lessons with hip-hop's traditional diction. Now, nearly eight years since his last solo record, Del has returned with his first project since taking a hiatus from the scene to study music theory. And, while keeping his nose in a book may have helped his verbiage, Del's biggest mistake on 11th Hour is that he decided to produce nearly the entire album himself.

11th Hour starts strong with the bouncy and impassioned "Raw Sewage," where Del comes out spitting in his classic amorphous flow, but the next few tracks grow redundant thanks to their similar funk-meets-old-school production. The same beats, instrumentation and structures make for a lifeless feel on songs where Del is otherwise on top of his game. Later tracks like "Foot Down" and "Last Hurrah" fare better thanks to some fresh grooves, but otherwise 11th Hour merely stands as a testament to Del's lyrical skills, not his production abilities. - Matt Whelihan

Jim White

Transnormal Skiperoo (Luaka Bop)

Poor Jim White. He's got the kind of name that discriminating hipsters are apt to confuse with other notable indie-rockers. A mere syllable separates him from Jack White, guitar virtuoso and white-boy blues yowler of the White Stripes and the Raconteurs, and he has a dead ringer in the other Jim White, virtuoso drummer for Australian instrumental rockers Dirty Three and timekeeper for Nina Nastasia on last year's acclaimed You Follow Me. This Jim White isn't much of a virtuoso, and his nom de rock doesn't carry quite as much currency as those other guys' in certain hipster circles, but Transnormal Skiperoo is a fine album all the same, thank you very much. The Pensacola, Florida native and former male model, New York cabbie, pro surfer, photographer and filmmaker turns in a solid set of lilting, heartfelt acoustic ballads on his new disc. It conjures up the long tradition of the country-influenced pop music that ruled the singer-songwriter realm before it got hip and became alt-country in the late '80s.

Jim White - Transnormal Skiperoo (Luaka Bop)

White sings in a high-register tenor somewhere between young Dylan, mid-career Tom Petty and current Ryan Adams. There are the obligatory pedal steel guitars and backing choruses reminiscent of Harvest-era Neil Young, as well as hand-claps, Memphis horns, plunking banjos and the entire instrumental arsenal of the Band's catalogue. But there are also Beatles strings, George Harrison-influenced sitar drones and daring time-signature shifts that buck the podunking alt-country norm, as well as bird twitters fluttering in and out of your headphones and clanking, knee-slapping spoons mimicking rickety old trains barreling across the South. Transnormal Skiperoo is an organic, multi-textured album that stretches out and really breathes, one filled with reverberating instrumental passages that suggest the dark, weird depths of the Georgian pinewoods in which it was written. White also turns in some literate yarns of Southern Gothic desperation and redemption, recalling Flannery O'Connor and alt-country kin the Drive-By Truckers, with just the slightest dash of good-times pop sensibility to keep it interesting. In short, it's classic alt-country with an emphasis on the country, and a heartfelt collection of songs, hipper doppelgangers be damned. - Brandon Lichtinger

Cassettes Won't Listen

Small-Time Machine (Self-released)

Jason Drake has come to considerable notoriety in the past four years under his nom du beat as Cassettes Won't Listen. Drake created his first stir when he presented CWL as an actual band and invented fictional bios for his electropop "foursome," but eventually copped to the ruse. Drake's work on his initial releases attracted so much critical acclaim that he's been offered some high-profile remix opportunities, giving artists like Dr. Octagon, Morcheeba, Midlake and Brookville his own personal chopsonic treatment.

For Small-Time Machine, his first traditional CWL release (everything to this point has been download only), Drake downplays guitars for an almost exclusively synthesized atmosphere, layering sheets of electronic sound into a virtual synth-pop symphony. Although Drake's voice could hardly be considered another instrument in the mix, his charmingly vulnerable delivery and lyrical naivete work well in the context of the blip-and-grind soundscape he's created on Small-Time Machine. The delicate interplay between piano and synth builds to incredibly effective crescendos, as on the melancholy snap/crackle/pop of "Large Radio," the Radiohead-meets-Postal Service drive of "Paper Float," and the Moby-channels-Brian Wilson melodicism of "Freeze and Explode." While it may be true that Drake has previously created more compellingly interesting work in his Cassettes Won't Listen persona, Small-Time Machine exudes the sound of an electronic auteur exploring the simple pop side of his equation and finding the simple bliss therein. - BB