HIP-HOP: Cam'ron & Vado, "Gunz N' Butta" (E1)
Cam'ron has two things his protégés can learn from him: how to rap and how to live. They're emphatically not the same. For more than a decade, Cam'ron has been nurturing one comer or another, but with mixed results -- most of them learn how to show off, but only a few learn to put words together like the boss, a master of intricate sneers.
It wasn't clear that Vado would become one of them from his early work, which felt hesitant and awkward, but on last year's album "Slime Flu," he came into his own, and on "Gunz N' Butta," a collaborative album with Cam'ron, he's almost keeping up with his mentor.
Which is impressive, because Cam'ron sounds invigorated on this album, some of his best work in years. No one writes sentence-length rhymes like Cam'ron, and this album is full of them, long runs that feel entrancing and dizzying all at once. Often Cam'ron is only as good as his producers. Here, on almost every song, fortunately, that's the aggressive Araabmuzik, who's perfected the sort of ominous bombast that Cam'ron takes to best.
On "American Greed," Cam'ron tips his hat to his younger partner: "Vado got a vision that's so raw, say no more/Rewind, he remind me of me in '04." That may be a bit of an oversell -- where Cam'ron never sounds anything but relaxed, Vado is an excitable vocalist, who appears to be panting as he raps. He understands that to rap as vividly as Cam'ron requires work.
- JON CARAMANICA, NEW YORK TIMES
POP/ROCK: Tune-Yards, "w h o k i l l" (4AD)
Merrill Garbus doesn't want to make things easy, starting with the typographic quirks of the name of her project, tUnE-yArDs. She recorded her first album, 2008's "Bird-Brain," at home on a digital voice recorder, using found sounds and field recordings to scuff up her percussion, ukulele and startlingly dynamic voice. The new "w h o k i l l" is a studio recording, and Garbus is joined by bassist Nate Brenner. It expands her sound without diminishing her eccentricities.
The foregrounding of beats -- often a pounded snare drum -- roots Garbus' songs in hip-hop and bhangra, and "Gangsta" sounds a bit like M.I.A. But tUnE-yArDs tunes twist and turn, with splatters of guitar and bleats of horns, and Garbus' voice leaps and gallops through singsong melodies, so "w h o k i l l" is deliciously difficult to pin down. Fans of Dirty Projectors, Björk (at her most experimental), and Yoko Ono take note: Here's a new avant-pop contender.
- STEVE KLINGE, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
