That rumbling, bass-heavy track doesn't appear on Pilot Talk II, and its omission is actually a good thing. My favorite Curren$y track from the past year is '4 Hours & 20 Minutes (Ride to H-Town)', a team-up with the blowhard Houston underground fixture Killa Kyleon that hit rap blogs shortly after the release of the first Pilot Talk. And on the sequel, Curren$y and Ski go even further with that central idea, pushing into sleepy, smooth funk territory that fits Curren$y's rap style perfectly. Teaming almost exclusively with veteran New York producer Ski Beatz, Curren$y rapped over a luxuriously dazed bed of lava-lamp instrumentals that pulled plenty of sounds from woozy psych-rock. And after he spent years with hometown powerhouses No Limit and Cash Money, and then on the mixtape circuit, Curren$y finally found his ideal place on the first Pilot Talk album, just a few months old now. Instead, his understated punchlines sneakily find ways into your brain and stay there.

But he's not the type to smash us over the head with his strengths. Curren$y is a great pure rapper, a language addict with a tricky slip-sliding delivery and an ability to keep going for minutes at a time, uninterrupted by choruses. Near the end of Pilot Talk II, we get something resembling a mission statement from the sleepy-eyed young New Orleans rapper Curren$y: 'Kill these beats humane fashion, painless.' It's a perfect description of the man's rap style.

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