1. Butch Walker & The Black Widows - The Spade
Walker's last album, I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, was my #1 album of 2010, so obviously I was anticipating this big time. But I think that Walker's real gift is for indelible songs that feel so tossed off and effortlessly catchy that there's not much room for high expectations or disappointment. So I don't care if this is not as front to back great as the last one because it's still making me smile more often than not, just a really raucous rock record with a lot of thought and heart put into every song and some really fun, unusual arrangement choices. The second half is where it really starts to click for me, particularly on "Day Drunk" and "Closest Thing To You I'm Gonna Find."

2. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch The Throne
This is better than any album either of these guys have done in a few years, but considering my general feeling about their recent output that's not really high praise (that is to say, it's nowhere near anything they did before 2006). I can take or leave most of it, but there are two songs that make it worthwhile for me. One is "That's My Bitch," which continues Kanye's weird habit of layering Charlie Wilson's vocals over the Bon Iver guy's vocals so that people think the latter is actually a competent R&B singer, which has fooled an amazing number of people. The other is "New Day," which is probably the first time in a long long time that I've really felt like Jay's verse is just totally speaking from the heart in a totally frank and unfiltered way like he used to all the time on his albums. Jay and Beyonce are such a private and in many ways unknowable power couple, but that verse on "New Day" combined with B revealing her pregnancy at the end of perhaps the single greatest live performance of her live were really this exhilarating, beautiful human moment that I thought was just awesome and made me feel really happy for them, as people (perhaps partly because their relationship started around the same time as mine with my wife, and they got married around the same time as we did, and now they're having a kid not long after us).

3. Gucci Mane & Waka Flocka Flame - Ferrari Boyz
Maybe it's because Gucci's manager is Waka's mother, but the affiliation between these guys always seemed like a marriage of convenience that didn't result in much personal or musical chemistry. That said I feel like them kind of meeting each other halfway aesthetically on most of the tracks on this tape works better than I expected it to.

4. Mike Doughty - Yes And Also Yes
I've always been kind of ho hum about Mike Doughty's post-Soul Coughing solo career, which can be a bit drab and overly familiar to a fan of that band. But I enjoyed Golden Delicious enough a few years ago to check this out, and it's not nearly as engaging but has its moments, especially the two "Telegenic Exes" tracks, which make me wish he would do another solo joint as intimate and semi-lo fi as Skittish again.

5. Mike Doughty - Dubious Luxury
When I heard that Doughty had a new album, I went and pulled this up on Spotify and listened to it, not realizing that he actually released two albums in August, and this one was kind of the offbeat teaser for the 'proper' singer/songwriter album Yes And Also Yes. It's interesting to hear Doughty toy extensively with beats and vocal loops on Dubious Luxury, but a lot of said vocal samples are kind of annoying, and since I just listened to El Oso recently it was hard to forget that he was once part of a band that integrated electronic elements into his songs so much more inventively.

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