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Bronx iconoclast KRS-One and Brooklyn hard case Buckshot hold a hip-hop revival meeting on their debut duo album, inviting Mary J. Blige, Talib Kweli, and K'naan to help protect the world from Auto-Tunin' "Robots." The beats by producers Black Milk, 9th Wonder, and Havoc are strictly no-frills, but just hot enough to keep these cranky yet lovable old MCs' joints from stiffening up.

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On his 2006 debut, Monsters & Silly Songs, French producer Joakim Bouaziz meandered through assorted bastard pop styles, with one fantastic club hit (“I Wish You Were Gone”) to show for it. Milky Ways is a clear upgrade, with better songwriting lending structure to his adventurous genre-hopping.

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Jason “Nosaj Thing” Chung is the latest product of Los Angeles’ heralded “beat music” scene, where artists such as Flying Lotus merge instrumental hip-hop and laptop electronics. Nosaj’s remarkable, entrancing debut album gathers sundry influences, from U.K. dubstep to Aphex Twin-styled IDM, into a 36-minute computerized symphony.

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ApSci are poster children for a postmillennial, post-racial fantasy: White rapper-producer Raphael LaMotta is a Bronx-born former punk bassist, while classically trained Filipina singer Dana Diaz-Tutaan hails from Australia.

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No current musician can write an introspective spiritual like Georgia Anne Muldrow, and her influence on Erykah Badu, Mos Def, and many others proves she’s on the cusp of becoming a major artist. But she’s a maddening visionary, committed to free-form improvisational soul. The result is her latest in a series of messily revelatory releases.

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Three years after their debut, this trio is already preoccupied with career issues, from half-assed promoters to message-board haters. But MCs Donwill and Ilyas and MC-producer Von Pea lend a fresh perspective to these shopworn clichés. Crisp beat loops recalling Pete Rock and 9th Wonder accompany smooth hip-hop soul ("Never Enough") and indie-rap ciphers ("Never 2ndary").