The recent glut of young musicians spilling out of Harlem isn't limited to rappers: this year may belong to Tim Vocals, a gifted singer who first gained attention through his gritty YouTube freestyles, especially a weeded-up flip on Drake's "Marvin's Room" shot a cappella in an elevator with his boys acting as back-up scenery. His debut mixtape, Live From Harlem, showed Vocals is a force who can approximate the transcendent tone of Michael Jackson, while painting a picture of uptown drugs, guns, and girls — he wryly turned "Human Nature" into a day in trap life ("I jumped in my bed / With all my clothes on / Because I'm suuuper high"). His most recent with Nino Man, Everythingx2, establishes Vocals as a street realist in the vein of Jaheim or Lyfe Jennings: he doesn't try to hide his masculinist, often bluntly nasty viewpoint behind his silken vocals, but he's also getting more comfortable playing the confident seducer, a smooth counterpart for Nino's scratchy raps. The mixtape is clever and shows their range, flipping Drake's "Successful to Stressful," LL Cool J's "Hey Lover" to "We Smoke, We Fuck," Bow Wow and Chris Brown's "Shawty Like Mine" to "Butta Like Mine," even TLC's "Creep" sung from the perspective of, well, the creep. His honesty is refreshing, at least, and his buttery vibrato is enough to believe he's the truth. It's also hard to picture a 2013 in which he doesn't land a Rocky-esque record deal, unless someone's really slipping. J.E.S