Music

Carly Simon
This Kind Of Love

After four decades as one of the world's top singer/songwriters, with a truckload of hits that have helped shape pop music, you might think there's little new ground that Carly Simon could plow. And you'd be wrong.

On her first album of original material in eight years, Simon ventures into Brazilian music with a passion, turning out a delicious, fresh pop record that will make you feel as if you're dancing on a beach with sand between your toes and a sultry breeze in your hair.

The title track is a dusky, sensual ode to new, exotic romance, and "Island" is the kind of dreamy theme you would expect from the title, even paying homage to The Beatles' "Sun King" in its intro.

Parenting is also a recurring theme in the album, from "Hold Out Your Heart" and "They Just Want You To Be There," to "Sangre Dolce," a true story about an Argentinian nanny Simon met in New York. She told the woman her baby was beautiful, but the caretaker broke into tears, revealing the child wasn't hers; her own child was thousands of miles away while her mother worked to earn money by taking care of someone else's child.

Dizzee Rascal
Maths + English

It makes perfect sense that British grime rapper Dizzee Rascal would eventually release his stateside discs on Definitive Jux — the New York indie hip-hop label known for artists with nearly impenetrable wordplay and caustic beats such as Company Flow, Cannibal Ox and Aesop Rock.

Since Rascal debuted in 2003 with Boy In Da Corner, an album full of hard truths about black Brit life over jagged-edged shards of sound, he's hewed closer to that label's sonic aesthetic than any other commercial U.S. hip-hop.

On his third disc, Maths + English, Rascal's Brit-accented delivery still runs thick and fast but his beats are a tad less dissonant than past efforts. Whether that approach is a conscious effort to court a broader American fanbase is debatable. Granted, Lily Allen's near-falsetto graces the hook on the deceptively peppy critique of phony hardmen, "Wanna Be." And later on the bass-banger "Where's Da G's," Rascal enlists Houston rap vets — UGK's Bun B and the late Pimp C — to continue his beef against inauthentic posers. Rascal chants: "Liar, liar pants on fire/ You're not gangsta, you're not street/ You just make yourself sound gangsta when you're rapping on a beat."

Familiar hip-hop tropes notwithstanding, the disc is still not an easy listen. But for hip-hop adventurists, Rascal remains Britain's most compelling rapper.

Estelle
Shine

Whether with effortless R&B phrasing or a tart hip-hop flow, British newcomer Estelle shows that she suffers no fools — especially if they're men.

The tangy "More Than Friends" finds Estelle, the first artist on R&B singer John Legend's label, serving notice to an indecisive lover by admonishing, "If I wanted to be part-time, I'd be working at a check-out line" while on "No Substitute" she purrs, "I know the games you play so I'm through with you."

That talk to the hand 'tude punctuates much of this playful, solid debut, especially on the cheeky "Wait A Minute (Just A Touch)." Produced by will.i.am (other collaborators include Wyclef Jean, Kanye West and Legend), "Wait a Minute" links feisty couplets ("just because we're kissing/don't mean we're undressing") to a stuttering beats, derived from an unlikely merger of music from Screaming Jay Hawkins and '70s funk band Slave.

Santogold
Santogold

Philadelphia's Santi White — who performs as Santogold — has enough things in common with Sri Lankan-Brit MC M.I.A. to make the comparisons inevitable. Both employ Diplo and Switch as producers. Both women have oodles of hipster cred. And both deal in hybrid music that's simultaneously retro and futuristic.

But where M.I.A.'s dance blend dabbles in bhangra, dancehall, hip-hop and grime, Santogold conflates her power-punk, hip-hop, reggae and pop-rock influences into an entirely different stew.

Her self-titled solo debut shows off her stellar songwriting chops (she wrote most of R&B rocker Res' 2001 debut, How I Do) and a daring willingness to surround her high-pitched wail in an array of noisy, clanging electro-beats and hard-driving melodies.

Still, Santogold's strength lies more in her musical inclusiveness than her cynicism. She flits from dubby bliss of "Shove It" and the stop-start, bleep-synths of "Starstruck" to the space-agey sound effects and echo chambers of "My Superman" and the bubbly pop-rock of "Lights Out" and "I'm A Lady." The genre jumping is not for the close-minded, but it's obvious Santogold's not here to adhere to any one pop sensibility.