The result is artistic click bait, and its genius and connective power is that it doesn’t treat music fans as factions. This one is for everyone, all at once.

If anything, 7 Days acts as the inverse of The Chronic, wherein a famous hip-hop producer introduced the world to an up-and-coming MC weaned on P-Funk and George Duke; now, it's a pop-cultural hip-hop icon giving a bit of shine to an adept indie producer who can elicit all strains of funk in this 21st-century Zone of Zero Funkativity. It's not the dank, but breathe deep anyway.

Maybe the entire album is a meme itself, a grand existential joke critiquing the all-conquering rise of Internet culture by parodying its overwhelming randomness. Whatever it is, though, it's a bad rap record.

Blunt and crass, 2013’s Black Panties is all about selling nostalgia for a bygone age of hard-body sexist black machismo that Barack Obama is, in his own quiet way, helping to deflate.

Britney Jean may chart respectably because it leads the most musically uneventful December in years, but it will soon fade like "Perfume," because there's zilch in the way of humanity here.

The best mood music transfixes; merely excellent, Jetlag is sometimes too easily relegated to the background.

As long as Midnight Memories offers chorus after chorus of Gary Glitter-style fodderstompf, it sounds like the best boy-band album since No Strings Attached.

What's interesting about Saint Heron is that it trips giddily over the line between relatively conventional approaches (Aiko, Solange, Shawn) and more heavily processed, speculative stuff (Sampha, Iman Omari, BC Kingdom), but takes no pains to make an overarching statement.

These parts slide and slip through and around one another, creating a shifting matrix that consumes your attention for as long as the band wants to play.

It isn't just a celebration of the warm-up DJ; it's a self-portrait of an artist who wouldn't be who he is today without once having had all those empty rooms to fill.

Packed with these canny connections between music and lyrics, Cupid highlights Hynes' tremendous recent advancement as an arranger.

While there are mistakes and bum notes — and the group's enthusiasm about recording for the BBC had pretty clearly waned by the later sessions--the gorgeous harmonies from those legendary young larynxes sound as glorious as ever.

She remains singularly compelling and lovable as a celebrity, even if her records don't always match up to her outsized persona. Even at their worst, they only prove that the art is sometimes unworthy of the artist.

Ferreira is finally fully reveling in the swirling cacophony that is her sound and her life.

"Indie rock" has long since ceased to be either "indie" or "rock," of course, but Surfing Strange signifies on both counts, just when we desperately needed a refresher on the fundamentals.

The record is so one-note it makes its predecessor sound like an entire season at the London Philharmonic.

Like its creator, Matangi is flawed, frustrating, and occasionally confusing, but it's also intermittently brilliant and completely unique.

This album will never top MM1 or even 1999's Slim Shady LP for the visceral thrill of watching a celebrity twist and distort his own identity like a comic strip transferred onto Silly Putty. But we get rhymes. So many rhymes. More rhymes than some rappers manage in a whole career.

Reflektor is long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed. It has three to five genuinely great songs; it also wanders off into the filler hinterlands for 20 minutes or so (out of 70).

Scales are Middle Eastern, obviously; tempos range from up to mid-plus; the programmed drums generate rhythms that few American tub-thumpers could map, much less replicate. There's far more variety in what Sa'id plays than in what Souleyman sings--flute sounds, an orchestra once. But Souleyman's intensity nails it.

This is a pivot, this record, and a shrewd one, but "shrewd" and "boring" are not mutually exclusive.

Each song boasts a memorable harmonic shift or guitar filigree or hook, but successive listens reveal an overstuffed package whose melodic involutions aren't complex and/or simple enough to sustain more than an hour's worth of music.

Quickly working 11 tracks into 40 minutes, the album is visceral and unrefined, two qualities not often associated with Hebden.

Despite the full dismissal of punk roots here--the blended-in drumming, the lack of rollercoaster twists and turns in the tempos and time signatures--Uncanney Valley's only real stumbles are lyrical.

There's an exhilarating bleakness at the center of Virgins--the hollow at the heart of all things, nibbling inexorably away.

Get me out of here, take me back: That's breaking up in a nutshell, and Cults till this soil multiple ways.

It's far from an implosion, far from spectacular.

While 2010 debut Treats was an exotic, overdubbed roar (Big Black-meets-the-Waitresses for people who give a shit about those references), and 2012's Reign of Terror winked through a heavy heart at Mutt Lange's scorched-earth sound field, Bitter Rivals is sly and sleek.