Meek Mill, "Dreams Worth More Than Money"

Bully

“FEELS LIKE”

StarTime International / Columbia Records

Remember the early 1990s? Bully does. And this band’s debut full length album, “Feels Like,” is an expert revisiting of that time period. It sounds like the best pop album of 1993, just after Nirvana yanked what was once deprecatingly called alt-rock into the mainstream, a flock of hook-savvy melancholics in its wake.

Bully’s approach is more taut, cut through with a little garage-rock crispness. Others have mined this territory well of late — take some of the work of Speedy Ortiz or Dum Dum Girls, or Yuck’s 2011 debut album — but Bully has in Alicia Bognanno a special weapon. She’s a bracing songwriter, full of quick jabs and mundane details that end up being full of import.

Bognanno’s fury is righteous and matter of fact. On “Milkman,” she gripes about how easy it is to slip into a one-sided relationship: “I could be a milkman/or I could get up and I could be/what I want to be.”

Disappointment cuts both ways on this album, with neither party willing to let go: A placid stalemate hides intense vibrations beneath the surface. At the end of “I Remember,” she’s screaming — maybe to tell someone off, maybe to get that someone’s attention: “I know everything that freaks you out/That! Makes! You! Mad!/That! Makes! You! Melt!”

ON TOUR: October 17 — Mississippi Studios, Portland; www.ticketfly.com.

— Jon Caramanica,

New York Times

Meek Mill

“DREAMS WORTH MORE THAN MONEY”

Maybach Music Group / Atlantic Records

The first 90 seconds of Meek Mill’s 2012 debut album, “Dreams and Nightmares,” are placid — no drums, just piano and strings. He’s rapping crisply atop them, contemplative but not preachy. The build begins. The beat drops. He goes from speaking to shouting. The effect is that of a missile strike on a rural pond. It’s one of the great triumphant moments in recent pop, and it suggested that for every time Meek Mill was wielding his words like a billy club, there was a meditation just underneath.

Meek Mill has had some hits since then, urgent exclamations like “Levels” and “Monster.” But the “Dreams and Nightmares” intro has eclipsed them all, becoming his signature song, a quiet that shouts down the storm.

Which isn’t to say that he’s foregone rapping like a pneumatic drill on his second album, “Dreams Worth More Than Money.” He’s the shoutiest rapper since Ludacris, and for most of this album he sounds as if he really, really, really needs to tell you something.

But there’s that gravity, now, that needs to be maintained, and this new album is bookended with songs that showcase his pensive side. Meek Mill as motivational preacher might be his most evocative mode, but it is an odd and undervalued skill. In an era shaped largely by Drake’s puffed-chest emotional transparency and Kendrick Lamar’s intricate socio-political dioramas, Meek Mill and his Red Bull rap are without an obvious home. Present-day home, that is. Some of the strongest songs on this up-and-down album sound like lost 1998 Stretch and Bobbito freestyles — uncomplicated beats, complicated rapping.

— Jon Caramanica,

New York Times

Various artists

“DOPE: MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE”

Columbia Records

When an artist gets an opportunity to curate a soundtrack (let alone executive-produce the movie), he or she has a chance to do more than simply pick other people’s hits. For the soundtrack of “Dope,” set in South Central Los Angeles in the midst of nerd culture and ’90s hip-hop, Über-producer/singer Pharrell Williams did pluck period smashes, songs from such standout acts as Digable Planets and A Tribe Called Quest. But Pharrell did more: He inhabited the minds and souls of this ominous comedy’s lead characters, the fictional hip-hop/punk band Awreeoh (pronounced “Oreo”) — and wrote, produced, and played songs shaped by the film’s circumstances and speaking, singing, and rapping in the characters’ voices.

It’s a bold, funky move. Best of show is the hard-hearted “Don’t Get Deleted” by Awreeoh. If you close your eyes, it sounds like a mix of N.E.R.D. hits “Lapdance” and “She Wants to Move.” Pharrell even uses songs by other “Dope” actors, such as George Ramirez (aka Kap G) and Zoë Kravitz (her band LolaWolf) as part of the mix. Nice.

— A.D. Amorosi,

The Philadelphia Inquirer