hip/hop

Camp (Glass Note), the new full-length by Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover, aka Troy from Community ), is an entertaining mix of nutzoid cipher bravado and gutsy soul-baring, at least on the first listen. By now we know his tricks pretty well: string section drama here, standard R&B chorus arrangement No. 4 there, clever similes throughout. But it's hard not to root for a guy who wants it this bad. "I won't stop until they say James Franco is the white Donald Glover." —Patrick Rapa

tango

The title of the Oscuro Quintet's new album tells you everything: Music for Tango Ensemble (Big Round). Most of these tunes, played on bandoneon and accordion, piano, violin, guitar and bass, will delight serious dancers. Yet in the heart of the album, settled among the "5 Procrastinations," there is the sound of classically inspired tango dreams, drifting and beautiful and far from the ballroom. The OQ plays World Café Live on Tuesday (Nov. 29, worldcafelive.com). —Mary Armstrong

hip-hop

Eighty minutes of anybody ego tripping out (maybe emo tripping would be a more apt description) is a lot to take, but Drake, ever the mopey charmer, makes it a typically nuanced and pleasurable ride on Take Care (Universal Republic), not that it'll convince the haters. Subtler and smoother but also more monochromatic than his debut, it's an icier listen but a bolder aesthetic statement, all free-floating nocturnal, money-drunk, earnestly world-weary malaise. —K. Ross Hoffman

rock/pop

As though still stuck in a starry-eyed, pastoral post-Brit-Pop groove the rest of us have rudely tumbled out of, A Band of Bees (just The Bees to their fellow Britons) have been churning out sunny, amorphously '60s-referencing psych-pop (and the odd samba detour) for nearly a decade now. The lovely, leisurely Every Step's a Yes (Fiction/ATO), which reaches our shores a year late, is their gentlest, folkiest excursion yet, recalling forgotten soft-pop sophisticates like the Mamas and the Papas (covered quite faithfully here) and The Association. —K. Ross Hoffman