Album reviews: Kendrick Lamar impresses on leftovers, Loretta Lynn soars again

Kendrick Lamar, "Untitled, Unmastered" (Interscope)

Not bad for a bunch of leftovers — not bad at all. In this era of surprise album releases, Lamar dropped his latest project with little advance notice.

He billed it on Twitter as "Demos from 'To Pimp a Butterfly.' In Raw Form. Unfinished. Untitled. Unmastered." That's a pretty accurate summation of the eight-track, 34-minute album.

In the recent tradition of Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo," works in progress are all the rage in hip-hop. West's album was shuffled, resequenced and retitled so many times it became news long before it was put up for sale. Similarly, "Untitled, Unmastered" is presented as an unfinished work, though it rarely sounds like one.

The sessions for Lamar's 2015 album, "To Pimp a Butterfly," yielded these demos, some of which have been performed live, and they're drawn from the same stew of jazz, funk, soul, spoken word and avant-garde music that permeated that acclaimed release. The tracks favor upright bass, skittering drums and horn textures as much as loops and samples. Lamar employs a range of vocalists, from SZA and CeeLo Green, to augment his typically dense, diamond-hard rhymes.

Visions of apocalypse explode the bedroom rap that opens "Untitled 1": "Valleys and high places turn into dust / Famous screaming in agony." There will be a worldwide cleansing, Lamar's narrator warns, and it will sound like a Barry White record gone haywire.

In "Untitled 3," Lamar's narrator recounts conversations with four people from different cultures about how they interact with the world while flutes trill and an eager chorus of voices presses the master storyteller for details. Each person's truth is different from the others. Lamar sees his relationship with the "white man" as strictly defined by economics of the most parasitic and exploitive sort: "Tellin' me that he sellin' me just for $10.99 / If I go platinum from rappin', I do the company fine."

It's followed by immediate relief, a bright, uptempo track that echoes the unison horn lines and choir-like vocals of Earth Wind & Fire, with Green providing the breezy vocal hooks. Even amid this buoyancy, Lamar's narrator struggles to understand himself: "Do I let these personalities always conflict in me?"

With Lamar, there is an ongoing sense of unfinished business. His songs rarely pontificate or indulge in bromides. Instead, they openly struggle with issues of race and racism, identity and self-worth, the desire to possess the world or destroy it. We are all works in progress, he suggests — unstable, volatile, ever-changing. Why should a collection of songs be any different?

Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune

Loretta Lynn, "Full Circle" (Legacy )

This is her first album since the 2004 Jack White partnership "Van Lear Rose." Produced by Patsy Russell and John Carter Cash, it mixes stunning new songs like "Who's Gonna Miss Me?" with self-penned classics such as "Whispering Sea" and "Fist City," along with duets with Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson.

Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer