As a rapper, Mississippi's Big K.R.I.T. is pretty good but nothing amazing: With the empathetic warmth in his sticky drawl, he makes a convincing Southern everyman, and he has enough rhythmic dexterity to really stick to beats. On the new mixtape Return of 4Eva, he invests the cars-and-girls talk he's already been doing with a sort of conscious-rap sensibility; toward the back end of the tape, he leaves behind boasting to talk about poverty and racism and materialism, sometimes coming up with a truly evocative line. But he's also lost some of the snarl that made his delivery so great on tracks like last year's Curren$y/Wiz Khalifa collab "Glass House". He can get a bit clumsy when he tries to transform himself into some kind of loverman. And even in his strongest moments, he still sounds a whole lot like T.I. without much of T.I.'s effortless, charismatic confidence. He could still become an excellent rapper, but it hasn't happened yet.

As a producer, though, he's good enough that he could be half a Ying Yang Twin and his music would still be well worth the hard-drive real estate. On last year's free online album K.R.I.T Wuz Here, he marked his place in a lineage of organic, soul-sampling Southern rap producers that includes giants like Pimp C and Organized Noize, making hard-thudding personalized version of the tracks he must've heard growing up. On Return of 4Eva (still free, still online), he progresses even further, turning his sound into a sleepier, woozier flutter-- a comfortable bed for his voice to sink into. Refracted versions of guitar and organ sounds wind their way through oceans of bass, all building into a perfectly evocative, nostalgic sound. Every once in a while, he'll come with something harder, like the skeletal keyboard bloops of "My Sub" or the horn-and-organ thunder of "Sookie Now". But for the most part, he focuses on turning classic Southern rap sounds into comfort-food background music-- the sort of thing that sounds absolutely gorgeous in a car on a warm spring afternoon, when you're driving slow with the windows open. There's a reason that Return of 4Eva dropped just as the weather was getting warmer.

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