SUSANA BACA | Traves’as | Luaka Bop

Susana Baca, an Afro-Peruvian singer and ethnomusicologist, is committed to safeguarding the musical legacy of her slave ancestors. But despite her preservationist tendencies, she’s no purist. She prefers circles to straight lines, passion to pedagogy; Travesías, like all her albums, celebrates the cross-continental miscegenation that accounts for so much of what is beautiful and fascinating in every culture. Although the “world music” tag is often obnoxiously misapplied to anything that isn’t American or British in origin, in this case the label works: Baca’s music really does contain the world, or at least big chunks of it. The CD was recorded in New York City and features lyrics sung in French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, English, and Spanish.

As usual, though, it’s Baca’s exquisite contralto that dominates the disc, lending it an emotional coherence that blurs the borders of language and genre. By turns regal, fierce, sorrowful, and sultry, her voice is fluent in the only speech that matters, the kind that needs no translation. —Rene Spencer Saller

MEGAN REILLY | Let Your Ghost Go | Carrot Top

On Let Your Ghost Go, Megan Reilly evokes a bit of Memphis, where she grew up, and a bit of Brooklyn, where she now resides. Memphis comes out in her accent, which betrays the remnants of a twang, and her sporadic vibrato, which recalls the great honky-tonk angels of yore. Brooklyn comes out in her edgy art-rock arrangements, which her all-star backing band (featuring members of the Mekons, Pere Ubu, and Cat Power) carry out to perfection.

Regional markers aside, Reilly’s natural milieu seems to be the liminal—harder to pinpoint, perhaps, because it’s nowhere and everywhere at once, saturating the songs like a half-remembered dream. “On a Plane,” a lovely but unsettling ballad, elegizes Reilly’s dead grandmother; the title track, a more rollicking number, pays tribute to the late Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, whose “Little Girl in Bloom” Reilly covers immediately beforehand.

At its best, her music works on an almost subliminal level, lulling you into a state of perfect receptiveness and infiltrating your consciousness like a restless spirit. —Rene Spencer Saller

RIHANNA | A Girl Like Me | Def Jam

“SOS,” Rihanna’s current hit that modernizes Soft Cell’s ‘80s number “Tainted Love,” isn’t representative of A Girl Like Me’s tone. Most of the disc has a breezy, laid-back reggae vibe—roots, dancehall, and a little dub—that pays homage to Rihanna’s native Barbados. The songs don’t necessarily require Beyoncé- or Mariah-level singing skill, and as Rihanna showed on one of last year’s hottest singles, “Pon De Replay,” her understated strength is lending girly garnish to heady rhythms.

Girl’s most adroit production comes from Syndicated Rhythm Productions, who give Rihanna tracks with reggae foundations layered with pop elements.

On “Kisses Don’t Lie,” Rihanna is almost drowned out by a scratchy rock-steady guitar, and she doesn’t try to fight for prime position. She’s smart to fall back—listening to the track is like checking out an act while on a Caribbean vacation.

But Rihanna is capable of command. On the rootsy “Dem Haters,” she throws in a little commentary about users and abusers that steals the spotlight from the folks with the instruments. And on the hard-core dancehall track “Break It Off,” she doesn’t let guest Sean Paul steamroll her entirely.

The young singer falters only when her production does. Any abandonment of the island-urban formula for more standard contemporary R&B is disastrous. Rihanna lacks the pipes to carry a sappy piano ballad such as “Unfaithful” or a hokey acoustic-guitar-assisted fiasco such as “Final Goodbye.”  —Sarah Godfrey