Endangered Species is a re-release of New York producer, crate-digger and DJ Nickodemus’ debut album with a couple of bonus songs and remixes. The tracks are all cut from the same hip hop based cloth, but Nickodemus brings to each of them a world flavour, blending familiar with foreign in a no-nonsense style. There’s a smidgen of an influence from every corner of the globe on this, an indispensable album for hip hop, nu-jazz and world music aficionados alike. SC

Low Budget Soul it may be but cheap it most certainly is not. If you were to predict how soul music is set to evolve, it would probably sound something like ‘Strangers to the Ordinary’, full of smoother-than-silk vocals and sublime sample-based beats. The combination of these two fundamentals makes for an outstanding album of future soul which will appeal as much to devotees of downtempo as much as it will to soul and nu-jazz heads. Real dot-joining business. SC

Arrested Development’s new long player represents the latest instalment in the group’s dogged quest against the materialistic bills-and-bitches hip hop movement. In this respect, it’s pretty successful, though an insistence on inoffensive lyrics, pop-hop beats and faux scratching makes this album feel about 10 years too late. A cheesy but reasonably danceable cover of the Jackson Sisters’ ‘I Believe in Miracles’ has to be the highlight of what is a rather hit-and-miss jumble of innocuous tracks. SC