Oliver Wang

The Blueprint 3 is the latest release by rapper Jay-Z; it's the second sequel to one of his best-known releases, 2001's The Blueprint. It's also Jay-Z's 11th solo album in 13 years, making him one of hip-hop's most prolific artists. Reviewer Oliver Wang suggests that, even this far into his career, the rapper is still finding ways to stay on top.

In a curious case of musical evolution, the older Lee Fields becomes, the closer he gets to perfecting the sound of soul that he grew up with. His latest release, My World, finds an ideal middle ground between the slow grind of Southern blues and the faster, funkier stylings of retro-soul.

In the mid-1960s, an electrician converted his basement into a jerry-built, custom studio he dubbed Double U Sound. Between 1967 and 1981, Felton Williams recorded more than 300 reels of tape. Downriver Revival is the first in a series of compilations focusing on the recordings of these local studios.

The Chicago rapper's new album, 808s and Heartbreak features him singing instead of rapping, but he's filtered his vocals through the voice processing system known as Auto-Tune, an increasingly popular trend among pop artists. The result is a melancholy, intimate and decidedly quirky effort.

As leader of the 1990s hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip rose to fame on the strength of their jazz-influenced production and his smooth, unruffled rapping. After problems plagued his solo career, Q-Tip disappeared from the music scene. He has now resurfaced with an entirely new CD, The Renaissance.

Inspired by The Jackson 5, the '70s and late '60s saw a panoply of very young R&B bands emerge across the country. Though many groups released but one single before fading into obscurity, a new compilation CD documents the best of "kiddie soul."

Her creations invoke polyglot rhythms and revolutionary rhetoric from around the world. But singer, producer and rapper M.I.A. communicates them through agitated, propulsive dance music. Two years after her debut, her new album finds her more adventurous than ever.

Nicole Willis is a retro soul singer from Brooklyn. Her really tight band, the Soul Investigators, is from Finland. The group sounds like it's from Memphis – and it's one of Oliver Wang's favorites of the year so far.

Many critics are calling The Reminder by Feist, the new recording by the Canadian songwriter and singer, her best yet... and this may be her moment. She was the subject of an extensive New York Times profile. The record came out this week.

Migrant workers came from around the world to build Panama's transportation systems. They brought, among other things, music with them. Dozens of bands that came to be known collectively as Combos Nacionales married musical styles as distinct and distant as New York boogaloo, Cuban descarga and Trinidadian Calypso. Panama: Latin, Calypso and Funk at the Isthmus charts this uniquely Panamanian hybrid.