It’s odd to me how so many people project their own expectations onto this album. I feel like I keep reading about how this is a return to G-Funk, or how this album could only happen in L.A., or how this is a Gangsta with a capital “G” album. Frankly, I’m not sure I hear any of this. To me, Dam-Funk is all about late ‘70s and early ‘80s experimental synth and drum artists, and I find him interesting because he pulls off the feat of being a throwback artist while still being progressive.

Remember the days when it seemed like Mos Def might become an interesting artist to cross over into the mainstream? Clearly he is not interested in doing that with his music. After the contractual “F-You” that was True Magic, Mos decided to make an album with the likes of Madlib and Oh No, two brothers who don’t want to make pop records. They do have quite a track record of making interesting and challenging music, and that’s definitely what’s going on here.

Souls of Mischief, the subset of Hieroglyphics consisting of Opio, Tajai, A Plus, and Phesto, haven’t released an album since 2000. For this one, they enlisted the help of Prince Paul on production duties. His work on this album is great; the beats sound great coming through my speakers. However, just three songs into the album, I can’t believe how bad the lyrics are. “Won!” features sexist and homophobic lyrics, talking about “pantyhose critics,” and other lines I’m not comfortable repeating.

Crown City Rockers are a bit of a hidden gem from the Bay Area as a group with live instrumentation. You might not be familiar with them because it has taken them four years to follow up their last album. You might be familiar with member Headnotic and his work with The Mighty Underdogs, but otherwise they’ve probably been overlooked if you’re not from the region. With their style, I don’t see them knocking anyone out with this album, but I do see it creeping into a lot of people’s rotations.

As Definitive Jux finally re-releases Funcrusher Plus, I can’t help but think it’s a weird thing to revisit albums like this. An album that is historically regarded as a turning point in underground hip hop, it’s tough to listen to this album objectively. It’s easy to look at this album and say, “This is the album that gave us El-P, Mr. Len and Bigg Juss and El-P’s falling out with Rawkus gave us Def Jux.

I had not heard of Prof & St. Paul Slim before, but when I see an album called Recession Music being sold for $5, and know that they are part of a very strong Minnesota scene, my interest was piqued. Unfortunately, the album does not live up to its potential. The production on the album is good, but lyrically the album really falls short. Instead of being a smart political album released at a crucial point in U.

This is a reissue of an album that was originally released in 2007, and am I glad that the good folks at anticon did, because I totally missed it the first time through, and that just ain’t right. This album was created as the soundtrack to This is My Element, a skateboarding film put out by Element Skateboards. The film isn’t especially noteworthy, unless you’re really into skateboarding. And quite frankly, I think the soundtrack holds up better as an album without the film to weigh it down, which feels a little bit of an odd thing to say, but sometimes that happens.

DJ-produced albums can be tricky. There’s a difference between a coherent studio release of original material and a mixtape. BK-One, Brother Ali’s deejay for years, surely knows this. How else could he have made such a brilliant, carefully-crafted album built off of Brazilian music samples? If you’ve seen Ali in concert, you know that BK-One is a great live deejay. However, most of us probably didn’t know he was capable of something like this.

Abstract Rude, veteran of the L.A. scene and member of such groups as Abstract Tribe, The A-Team, and Haiku D’etat, come at us with his first solo album in about five years, and his first for Rhymesayers. The album features production by Vitamin D, whose slow, laid back grooves seem like a good fit for the low smooth delivery of Ab’s voice. My complaint about this album would be that there lacks any sort of home run tracks.

This album is the second in a series of albums that Aceyalone decided to do as experiments in crossing other genres with hip hop, which started with 2007’s Lighting Strikes, his foray into reggae. While reggae is not the oddest direction to take hip hop (the family tree doesn’t split that far back), I had to pause when I heard that this album with be Acey’s experiment with doo-wop. This isn’t as quite a natural fit, and it takes a little bit of finagling to make it work.