Charlie Poole wasn’t a particularly brilliant banjo player (although his later three-finger picking style would set the table for the advent of bluegrass banjo a couple of decades after his death), and he wasn’t the world’s greatest vocalist, either, but he had a certain devil-may-care charisma that made him a superstar in the string band era of the 1920s. Poole’s greatest talent-aside from an ability to go on long drinking sprees and somehow be at the center of things even in his absence-was in his song adaptations, which drew from sources outside the standard Appalachian fiddle tunes and reels, including pop, ragtime and blues.

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Jay-Z making a series out of his best album, 2001’s The Blueprint, was a recipe for trouble from the beginning. The Blueprint of the first volume was Jay-Z as vital as he’d ever been, storming back to the hardcore after a few years of commercial success. The Blueprint of the second volume was a complete turn, a set of half-cocked crossovers, bloated to bursting with guest features that obscured his talents. The Blueprint 3 is somewhere between the two, closer to the vitality and energy of the original but not without the crossover bids and guest features of the latter (albeit much better this time).

Kanye West is in the producer’s chair for seven tracks, and it’s clear he was reaching for the same energy level as the original Blueprint (which he produced). “What We Talkin’ About” begins the album with a wave of surging, oppressive synth, while Jay-Z enumerates with an intriguing lack of detail what he’s said and what’s been said about him, ending with a nod to Barack Obama and the future. West also produced the second, “Thank You,” and while it starts with typical Jay-Hovah brio, the last verse piles on more witty criticism of unnamed rappers. There’s plenty more lyrical violence to come, but most of the targets are much safer than they were eight years earlier. (Jay doesn’t sound very convincing when he claims in “DOA (Death of Auto-Tune)” that it’s not “politically correct” to rail against one of the most reviled trends in pop music during the 2000s.)

From there, he branches out with a calculating finesse, drawing in certain demographics via a roster of guests, from Young Jeezy (hardcore) to Drake (teens) to Kid Cudi (the backpacker crowd). The king of the crossovers here is “Empire State of Mind,” a New York flag-waver with plenty of landmark name-dropping that turns into a great anthem with help on the chorus from Alicia Keys. The Blueprint 3 isn’t a one-man tour de force like the first; Jay is upstaged a time or two by his guests, and while the productions are stellar throughout — Timbaland appears three times, and NO ID gets multiple credits also — it’s clear there’s less on Jay’s mind this time. Not tuned out like on Kingdom Come, but more content with his dominance as a rap godfather in 2009.

Facing the third album blues, the Arctic Monkeys turned to Josh Homme, the Queens of the Stone Age mastermind renowned for his collaborations but heretofore untested as a producer. On first glance, it’s a peculiar pair — the heirs of Paul Weller meet the heavy desert mystic — but this isn’t a team of equals, it’s a big brother helping his little siblings go wayward and get weird. Homme doesn’t imprint his own views on the Monkeys but encourages them to follow their strange instincts, whether it’s a Nick Cave obsession or the inclination to emphasize atmosphere over energy.

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On “E&R,” left-field rapper — and that’s deep left-field — Dudley Perkins looks around the room and notices “We gotta lotta fake people here this evening.” “We gonna expose and remove” he continues, and then proceeds to chant down the walls of Babylon by calling out John McCain, Louis Farrakhan, Miss Cleo, and many others, all over a broken version of the George Clinton beat courtesy of the album’s sole producer, Georgia Anne Muldrow. Besides these ghosts that the track exorcises Lee “Scratch” Perry-style, there isn’t a lick of “fake” on Holy Smokes, an album that shares its release date with Muldrow’s own Umsindo.

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Involved with so many recordings since the 2006 album Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, avant-R&B/hip-hop queen Georgia Anne Muldrow could be accused of spreading herself thin. There was Pattie Blingh and the Akebulan 5’s Sagala (very nearly a one-woman show) and G&D’s The Message Uni Versa (with Dudley Perkins), smaller-scale collaborations (highlighted by Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher”) and several productions (most recently showcased on Eagle Nebula’s Cosmic Headphones and the Ms. One compilation). Released the same day as Perkins’ Holy Smokes, an equally lengthy disc for which she also served as producer, Umsindo is a sprawling and somewhat disjointed 74-minute album. Placing an exclamation point — or maybe an interrobang — on Muldrow’s creative energy, it is a prime example of the new school rhythm & blues where progressive soul, experimental jazz, and organic hip-hop are indivisible.

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The Summer Cats aren’t the kind of cats who like to curl up and purr the day away, they’re more apt to chase things, run around wildly, and basically tear stuff up. The Australian quintet states their aim as clearly as possible on the first track of their first album Songs for Tuesdays. “Let’s Go” bursts out of the gate with a supercharged Flying Nun-inspired attack (the Clean especially, but also some early Chills too) built around fuzzy guitars, peppy organ, and shouted vocals. The rest of the album follows in kind with barely a break for breath.

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Maxwell spent part of the eight years between his third and fourth studio albums walking the earth, attempting to experience a life resembling that of a human. One of neo-soul’s most visible faces, along with Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo, he had been on the music industry’s hamster wheel for most of his twenties and needed some tangible inspiration. At some point he got down to scheming and quite a lot of recording; BLACKsummers’night is the first release of a trilogy, with BlackSUMMERS’night (rooted in gospel, with a twist, apparently) and Blacksummers’NIGHT (promised as a disc of slow jams) to follow. Just as he arrived in 1996, offering an alternate option to the exaggerated masculinity that was dominating contemporary R&B, he returns as the airwaves are stuffed with raging hormones expressed through auto-tune. He has made no concessions to them.

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Love Is All’s late 2008 album A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night was a raucous blast of energetic, noisy post-post-punk that reduced the amount of noise in their sound (compared to their first album) but compensated with focused songwriting and intense performances. The follow-up Last Choice EP is headed by one of the highlights of the album, the disco-y tale of late-night woe “Last Choice,” and features five new songs that show that the band is moving farther away from the rattle and clatter of their initial approach and heading toward something more subtle and thoughtful, but still exciting and vital.

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