Despite the prolific amount of material having the possibility of thinning out the quality of his beats and rhymes, Plies just keeps getting better with every CD.

Your best bet is to find a website you can listen to snippets of this album on and if one or two tracks strike your fancy, buy those. A whole album of SB's idiotic raps is still too much for one man or woman to take no matter how much better the beats are.

[comon] managed to record a whole ten scenes, I mean tracks, over the course of the year, and at least three of them are listenable.

At times their shared mic duties on this CD seem very forced, but the beats and guests smooth out those rough edges and help you to overlook the fact this unit isn't what it used to be.

Freedom will be a disappointment, and a predictable one at that.

No one will forget after Emeritus, an album that proves Scarface deserves accolades and titles just as much as we deserve for him not to retire.

Simply in musical and vocal terms, it feels too limited, mainly due to him over-thinking things.

While Ludacris may be professing loudly to do it for hip-hop on his latest album, it's refreshing to know he can do it for hip-hop and still do it for the mainstream who may not realize just how artful he really is.

In the City offers good production, excellent melodies, and - of course - the same song, idea(s), and kinds of guest appearances many times over.

The third album from T-Pain, Thr33 Ringz, finds him once again attempting to master the triple threats--rapping, singing and producing. That it turns out to be incredibly formulaic and slavishly apes his sophomore effort ("Epiphany") proves only to be a minor deterrent, since almost everything here is upscaled.

Whilst not quite a true Renaissance for hip hop, it certainly is a rebirth for Q-Tip--and fans of A Tribe Called Quest will dine out on this album for the next nine years too.

The music is kept grounded throughout by the guitar work and some exceptional sung hooks, but the MCs' ability to craft and deliver backpacker quality lyricism is what holds the whole thing together.

Tronic shows marked improvement in Black Milk as the total package; he doesn't excel by sacrificing his rhymes for the sake of the music, or vice versa.

This is a fun, modern rap album with strong roots in '90s creativity and '80s innocence that has the potential to reach longtime fans as well as recruit new followers.

Like the core message of Everything Is Borrowed, this album will, unfortunately, come and go soon enough, little trace left behind.

It's fair to say that if there's one criticism of Devin that can truly stick it's that he takes the "Dude" aspect of his personality very seriously, and in few songs will you see him regard women as more than just objects of his sexual conquest. Nonetheless songs like 'Me, You' show he can still charm a girl or two.

Producers have historically had a difficult time with albums, but Jake One shakes that trend and comes through with a hot album.

Lyrically, Sway is on fire (take that as read for the whole album) and his tongue-twisting raps will dazzle any unfamiliar ears.

With very little filler and a strong selection of songs from start to finish, the hype that this is potentially "album of the year" according to Atlantic Records may ACTUALLY be true.

Mr. Dibbs and Oh No might have been preferable to will.i.am and Nottz, even though the beats here are decent enough. It's cool to see Murs get the money he deserves for his project and even to hear him team up with luminaries like Snoop, and it's head and shoulders above the other garbage the major labels are circulating these days.

While the tracks never reach and identity outside their own samples Greg does breath fresh new life into them and make things you've probably heard a thousand times, exciting again.

It's counter-productive to analyze Keith's verses too carefully, because at some point they're just well constructed and well delivered jabberwocky.

Put a little pop in your life and what you'll discover is that underneath the materialistic veneer Nelly's got a good delivery, sharp lyrics and impeccable breath control, which would make him #1 no matter WHERE he was from.

This results in a lot of victories but not a whole lot of personality, and the closest we get to seeing Khaled's soul is the fact he tends to favor putting the Southeast's finest from Pitbull to Rick Ross on his tracks.

Not all of the songs are in easy to digest radio play lengths either, as 'Live Forever (Fly With Me)' proves they aren't afraid to do a song that's over seven minutes long. The more that GHC take chances on this album, the more they succeed.

Even if this isn't a Grammy-winning album, it is actually better than most of the bullshit Def Jam has released this year, and if LL Cool J had a point to prove on Exit 13, he has made it in acerbic style.

Jeezy manages to keep a strong unified album together without ever getting monotonous or tired.

The album is an excellent listen from start to finish, and a generally successful snapshot of London in 2008.