Usually when you get a collection like this, it’s only meant for super-fans who want to claim they have everything the artist ever recorded. It won’t be good, but it might be interesting. You can catch a glimpse of what the artist was going to become. Also, you would wait until several albums into their career and use it to sate fans until the next album. Adolescent Funk does not fit into this mold.

The Left consists of producer Apollo Brown on the beats, DJ Soko on the scratches, and Journalist 103 on the mic. Soko and 103 are from Detroit, and Brown is from Grand Rapids. While environment always factors into the sound of an album, I don’t know if I’ve come across and album that’s as specific to its time and place as Gas Mask is to Detroit in 2010. It is no secret that times are tough right now, and now we have the soundtrack.

Gangrene is the collaboration between producers/emcees The Alchemist and Oh No. The Alchemist is best known for his work with Dilated Peoples, and also for his two solo albums. Oh No has worked on living outside brother Madlib’s shadow, mostly by being prolific. He releases several solo albums and produces tracks for Mos Def, Doom, MED, Aloe Blacc, and Murs, among others. I especially like Oh No’s Dr. No’s Oxperiment, and brilliant collection of instrumental work he made from sampling records from Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, and Italy.

Four years after the release of his debut album, Valeen Hope, Loden, a Brussels-based producer, gives us his sophomore effort. While his first album tended towards a slower ambient atmosphere, Loden has come back with a second album that is much more immediate in its impact, bringing the focus on beats that wasn’t really there on the first record. It’s hard to pin this record down, as it brings in elements of hip hop, dubstep, house, disco, new wave, glitch, and other genres.

William Bucholz’s note at the beginning of Understand Rap says “…the intention of this book is not to poke fun at rap music. Rather, it is to highlight some of the more creative artists and lyrics in the genre today and to bring a basic understanding of concepts and themes in rap music to the attention of an audience who may not otherwise be exposed to these lyrics or give them a second thought.

On his debut solo album, Shine Through, Orange County native Aloe Blacc combined elements of soul music with some new-school hip hop, working with producers such as Madlib and Oh No. On his sophomore effort, Blacc created an organic throwback soul record that achieves the rare feat of sounding dated and relevant at once. This is in large part to the political awareness of songs such as “I Need a Dollar,” “Miss Fortune,” and “Life So Hard.

If you watch the documentary This is the Good Life: How The West Was One, there is a segment at the end of the film where different emcees involved with the L.A. underground hip hop scene are contemplating how their careers panned out since the years that they cut their chops at an open mic night at the Good Life Health Food Centre. Some are bitter that others copped their style and became more famous, while others wonder if it was ever meant to be.

Sometimes it feels like with the accelerated clip with which we encounter music in the information age, we can get bogged down in mediocrity. This is true to some extent, but it also means that every once in a while you can come across a scene that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise and become completely energized. Case in point: Lowrider Recordings. A collective of artists from Rotterdam in the Netherlands, who have come together over a love of bass, my ears have perked up with possibilities.

Right on the heels of their debut release, the Lowriders Collective come back with another EP, this time courtesy of Netherlands-based Coco Bryce. Bryce contributed a remix on the first Lowriders release from Ghost Mutt, and now it’s his time to shine. This is Bryce’s first solo EP, and he quickly establishes himself as a beatmaker to know. Much like Ghost Mutt, he bridges genres, combining hip hop, funk, dubstep, glitch, and skweee, a style of music popular in Scandinavia that derives it’s name from trying to squeeze all the sounds you can out of old synthesizers.

This has been a busy year for Declaime. After releasing a full-length solo album and a collaboration with Georgia Anne Muldrow, he comes back with his third album, this time with Spanish producer Koyto. This release is a natural continuation of the psychedelic hip hop fonk (the name of his last effort and a nice description of the funk that is heavy and uplifting all at once) he’s been laying down all year.