Schoolboy Q - "There He Go". Now this is how you swagger. This is how you do braggadocio in 2012. Striding, driving, charging right up to the thing that you want; and taking it. Q is high and elite, hot and packing heat. He's a fucking asshole, stealing girls, slinging metaphor. Pistols, pistachio, "whatever occur". He's not wrong when he raps: "Magnificent / They be like, 'There he go!'".

[buy Schoolboy Q's outstanding LP, Habits & Contradictions, at iTunes]

Bernice - "Rêve Général". She found him in spite of it all. Parc Avenue was a warzone: battered shopfronts, cleaved sidewalks, broken glass. Pianos were still falling from the sky. Each one began as a distant black dot, almost imperceptible in the cloudcover. Then slowly it would get larger, and larger, all telltale shape. And the birds would get out of its way. And then suddenly the piano would be so close as to be unavoidable, hurtling, fated. Each one hit the street with a sound like the end of the world. One unthinkable chord, jarring the air. Everything splintering: wood, wire, ebony, ivory. This was happening all around her. It had been happening for days. The pianos began to fall and now they kept falling - a whimsical devastation but still utterly murderous, unkind, final. She walked along Parc Avenue, dodging each growing silhouette, watching cats lap at black lacquer, toward him; and she found him, in spite of it all, because of the seriousness in her eyes.

[Toronto's Bernice have made a marvellous thing, with THOMAS's Thom Gill, Daniel Fortin, Sister Suvi's Nico Dann, and the singer Robin Dann / buy]