It’s a short record, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, but the Long Beach linguist crams in a lot of syllables and welcomes into the mix compadres including Earl Sweatshirt, Ty Dolla Sign and San Francisco legend E-40. Though he presents the material playfully, Staples has more on his mind than hot fun.

It veers wildly among mechanized garage rock, ’80s-era soft pop, atmospheric dance music and lush acoustic balladry; one song strongly recalls Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” while another looks back to the Great American Songbook. ... Excellent, often thrilling album.

Healthy doses of humor sit side-by-side with sincerity in this smartly conceived, engagingly executed holiday song cycle.

The R&B-pop singer-songwriter finds a way to bring urban music sensibility even to something as quintessentially foursquare as “Silver Bells.”

The pleasant surprise is the balance between his blues and adult pop instincts that's broad enough to include a fascinating disco-rock meeting-of-the-minds rendering of "Jingle Bells" and his canny interpretations of "White Christmas" and "Away in a Manger," along with one original, "Christmas Tears."

Certainly, there is no small number of Dylan completists who will lap up every shred of tape he ever used. But there emerges a feeling of diminishing returns for anyone not cursed with OCD--obsessive-compulsive-Dylanism--during a stretch on the second disc with nine consecutive versions of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Likewise the eight takes of “Buckets of Rain” on the fourth disc that are interrupted just long enough for a pair of performances of “Up to Me.”

It’s a warm, appealingly ragged collection suffused with wisdom and reassurance.

A fitting subtitle could be “Everything You Know About Funk is Wrong,” thanks to a couple of flat-out stunning solo performances on this session. This is not the Holy Grail of lost or shelved Prince albums.

Unlike much ambient music, Gave in Rest isn’t made for background listening. In fact, only with volume can you fully appreciate the depth of Davachi’s creation.

A blast to listen to.

His eccentric phrasing brings out new wrinkles in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” and in a “Young at Heart” that suggest he’s coming up with the song’s tricky intervals on the fly. And he and his producers, Buddy Cannon and Matt Rollings, make all kinds of unexpected choices with the arrangements, as in a sprightly “Blue Moon” and “It Was a Very Good Year,” which they give a lilting Cuban vibe.

The singer, no surprise, sets off all kinds of vocal fireworks. But as the painfully familiar images in “Southbound” demonstrate--another pontoon boat?--the songs on Cry Pretty (most of which Underwood co-wrote) cast these emotions and experiences in such generalized terms that it’s hard to come away with a clear sense of a human in the world. TThe effect is of a gifted strategist trying to cover all her bases.

Yet as easy as it should be for anyone to appreciate this thrilling and sincere record--truly, there’s no resisting the title track’s euphoric refrain--what might be most admirable about it is Sivan’s determination to make a particular group feel seen.

Hynes’ bold and moving album.

The songs are shiny and catchy of course. ... Yet there’s an uncommon sense of self-possession to this album--a kind of ecstatic calm--that sets it apart from everything else on Top 40 radio right now.

These 14 tracks merge synthetic funk, hip-hop, indie soul and a love of life. Songs including “Weird Part of the Night,” “Freaky Times” and “After the Load is Blown” possess chops and wit.

The fuddy-duddy stance--thou shalt rise from the streets and compose by hand with paper and pen--feels bitterly defensive, even when Minaj lives up to her boasts about her hard-won craft, which on Queen is almost all the time.

[DJ Mustard and YG] still sound great together in cuts like “Too Brazy” and “Slay,” with YG flexing his SoCal drawl over DJ Mustard’s crisp yet bouncy grooves; the music feels urgent but somehow unhurried, as though YG is sure the beat won’t go anywhere without him. The presence of his old friend brings out YG’s sly charm too.

Yet for all its tiresome megalomania, Scorpion is so beautifully rendered--from vocals to samples to features to beats--that Drake ends up pulling you over to his side, much like Kanye West did on his similarly vexing “Ye.”

He’s also got a distinctive, no nonsense style: lyrically direct without sacrificing a certain poeticism, willing to look directly at a topic and offer steely-eyed comment.

On Everything Is Love the two flex their muscles like it’s an Olympic sport. ... The inside references and the happy proximity to current rap also work in service of a larger point, which is thinking about black achievement in the context of a cultural and political system designed to hinder it. ... Mainstream art makes too little room for stories like that, especially when the grown-ups in question are people of color. But the Carters won’t be denied on Everything Is Love. For them, this hard-won encore is also a beginning.

She definitely goes further than Aguilera in tracks like “Ponyboy,” with a harsh beat that conjures smashed glass, or “Whole New World/Pretend World,” which stretches past the nine-minute mark. ... Yet the lyrics favor abstract concepts over intimate confessions; Sophie ponders consumerism in “Faceshopping” (“My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front”) and the power dynamics of sex in “Ponyboy.” Then there’s “Immaterial,” which feels like the key to apprehending this fascinating album.

Even at its busiest, though, the music emphasizes Aguilera’s powerful voice, which more than anything is what separates her from the younger stars whose popularity has eclipsed hers in recent years. She runs through the full gamut of moods, from flirty to depressed to joyful to furious--each a response, or so we’ve been trained to think, to some real-life situation.

While the depressive stuff is unsurprisingly disturbing--“I Thought About Killing You,” which opens Ye, evokes a school shooter’s nightmarish manifesto--West’s moments of euphoria prove no less vexing. ... This hymn-like ballad ["Violent Crimes"] built on churchy keyboards is so exquisitely rendered that, like much of Ye, it threatens to bring you over to his point of view.

Both a searing, emotional performance of Young and an ace band firing on all cylinders and a time capsule of West Hollywood in the early 1970s, the recording illuminates long-gone magic. Masterfully mixed, you can hear the delicate interplay among Young, guitarist-pianist Lofgren, the late steel guitarist Keith, bassist Talbot and drummer Molina.

The result is a confident, and comforting, celebration of American roots music.

A warm and vibrant tribute to the marginalized people, especially women and those with fluid ideas about gender and sexuality, whom Monáe sees as the true embodiment of America's promise.

What's remarkable about the album is how un-smoothed-out Cardi B sounds in this new environment. Though she clearly values the approval of old-fashioned arbiters, she won't dull her rough edges, as many have before her, to get it; the vivid result gives the impression that she's still in communion with her core audience.