1. Diddy-Dirty Money - Last Train To Paris
This already rocketed to being my #2 album of the year as soon as I heard it, but I'm still kind of exploring this whole long epic thing (specifically, the 81-minute iTunes deluxe version of the album with the alternate tracklisting) and finding new things in it with every listen. "Shades" and "Yeah Yeah You Would" and "First Place Loser" in particular are just incredible. And since this is really more of an R&B album than a rap album, it makes a nice way to top what kind of inadvertantly ended up being an all-R&B Monthly Report.

2. R. Kelly - Love Letter
I hated "When A Woman Loves" and everything it represents, in terms of R. beating you over the head with the classic soul pedigree that he usually subtly embeds into songs that are more modern, more creative, more human, and more uniquely his own. But I'm glad I got past that enough to check out this album, which to my pleasant surprise isn't at all a retro exercise most of the time, although it does mercifully retreat from the game of playing catch-up with all his mini-me's running around the charts (T-Pain, The-Dream, Trey Songz) that his last couple albums were becoming. More than anything, it's simply a throwback to the smoother side of the Chocolate Factory era, smoothed out even more, to the point that it recalls Donald Fagen solo albums more than any analog era soul music.

3. Keri Hilson - No Boys Allowed
In A Perfect World... was a perfectly nice, just good enough debut, both in terms of its quality and its commercial performance, and in a way No Boys Allowed follows suit by being just a little bit better and a little bit more consistent, but by no means any kind of major leap forward. If she keeps this up for 4 or 5 more albums, Keri might have a classic.

4. Ciara - Basic Instinct
This is a pretty hit-and-miss album for me, I love "Gimmie Dat" and "Speechless" and "You Can Get It" about as much as I hate "Ride" and "Turn It Up," so I never really get in a groove with it, it's all up and down for me. Still, Tricky Stewart is one of the best and most versatile producers in the business right now, and that guy who writes lyrics for his stuff is okay too.

5. Keyshia Cole - Calling All Hearts
Keyshia Cole's fourth album was released the Tuesday before Christmas, and I had no idea it even existed or that she had a single out until about a week later. So I partly checked this out sort of out of pity for how a pretty successful artist whose last album had big radio hits just kinda got an album tossed out with such little fanfare (although it sold better than every other album on this list, so maybe Keyshia's label knows what they're doing), but I did like A Different Me and loved a good amount of her singles. I'm less than thrilled with the increasingly adult contempo-leaning direction of her music, but that's at least partly for the very shallow reason that I figure the more mature and downtempo her music gets, the less we'll see of Keyshia's incredible rack. But this is a pretty solid slow jams album, and it deserves some credit for having a really sustained mood and coherent sound considering that it features contributions from a lineup of collaborators as all over the map as Timbaland, Dianne Warren, J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17, 2011 at 9:00 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.