I never heard of Gotham Green & Quickie Mart before I listened to this release. The bad news is that I can’t find a ton of information on them. The good news is that this release made me want to learn more. The first song I heard was “Game Change,” which features Planet Asia, Recalling the Pharcyde, it immediately caught my attention. The song features a great laid-back West Coast vibe and playful rhymes about weed, with good wordplay.

While I’m going to try my best to be objective, I need to be up front about this: I wear my Little Brother hoodie just about every day. I’m definitely a fan. Unfortunately, this album is going to be the last Little Brother album, at least for the foreseeable future. After hinting at this possibility after Get Back came out, Phonte and Big Pooh have decided to pursue other projects for the time being.

Rakaa might be the most overlooked member of Dilated Peoples. DJ Babu gets attention as part of the Beat Junkies crew, and fellow emcee Evidence has a couple of solo releases. With Crown of Thorns, Rakaa looks to step out and create an identity for himself. On the first few tracks, which are decent, it’s a bit more of the same in terms of his work with DP, but nothing really stands out.

Tompkins certainly picked an interesting topic to cover in his first book. There isn’t a wealth of material out there on the history of the vocoder, an interesting piece of equipment if there ever was one. I was certainly on board with the subject matter, and when someone like Jeff Chang, one of my favorite critics, tells me that Tompkins is the best hip hop writer born, I certainly take notice.

Going into 2010, I knew very little of Declaime or Georgia Anne Muldrow. As July draws to a close, they are both defining the year in music for me. They put out a great album together, and Muldrow released a stellar solo album on which Declaime was featured. With this release, the journey through smart psychedelic hip hop funk continues. As is quickly becoming a pattern for me, I love the tracks with Muldrow.

First, a call to action: please watch Nirit Peled’s Say My Name. I caught the 2008 documentary during the film portion of 2009’s SXSW and it was definitely the highlight of the week. Women Make Movies are in the process of getting it out on DVD after the film completes its festival circuit. Save it to your Netflix queue. Lobby your local rental store or library to obtain a copy. Make it a priority to see it.

This is the eighth studio album from Philadelphia legends The Roots. I’ve been looking forward to this album for a while, if only because I was a little let down with The Rising Down. Not that the album was bad, but it didn’t stick with me like The Tipping Point or The Game Theory. How I Got Over starts off slow with a treble a capella group singing dos and dahs as electric piano, bass, and drums are folded in, but it never grows beyond that until we get to the second track.

Madlib has done so much hip hop production, it’s easy to forget that he’s just as serious a jazz musician. This is his second jazz album of the year, along with the Young Jazz Rebels album. Here, we take a journey to the fusion jazz of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, paying tribute to artists like Derf Reklaw, Roy Ayers, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders. Madlib apparently spent the last two years tweaking this album until he was happy with it, and while I don’t know what the rough draft was like, I can say I enjoy the finished product.

On his fifth full-length album, anticon. mainstay Dosh brings us a world of music that has no real use for genre or classification. His typical composition method is based on looping multiple instruments, and his association with his label mates align him with hip hop and electronic music. He also just went on tour with indie-rock violinist Andrew Bird, who also makes an appearance on this album. I imagine others would want to put some sort of post-rock label on him, due to the mostly instrumental nature of the album and the loose song structure and ever-present drums.

Ten years after their initial collaboration as Reflection Eternal, Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek have once again joined forces to produce some fun and accessible hip hop that will also make you think. It takes a little bit for the album to get going, with an intro/skit that doesn’t quite come together, and a couple of songs that are decent but don’t really go anywhere. At this point, I’m just a little nervous that this ten-year reunion is going through the motions.