Charli XCX

Charli XCX

Album: “Sucker” (Atlantic Records)

Grade: B

Charli XCX, the British artist with a penchant for teenage churlishness, knows a thing or two about warfare. With her second major label album, “Sucker,” she throws a smoke grenade of rock-pop digestibles and runs for cover while the listeners stumble around intoxicated and confused.

Having made a name for herself in the last 18 months on collaborations such as Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” the 22-year-old is one more weird and wonderful song short of becoming the new “it” artist.

First single “Boom Clap”— also on the soundtrack of the film “The Fault in Our Stars” — is an electrifying synth with a punchy hook. The dark sound of “Break the Rules” gives her an edge mitigated by the somewhat childish chant, “I don’t wanna go to school/ I just wanna break the rules.” The song, however, works as a potent instigator to party.

The title track is another cheeky rock invective thrown at all those boring adults who don’t know how to have fun. The sound throughout “Sucker” borrows riffs heavily from mid-’90s alternative rock bands like Elastica, especially on tracks like “Gold Coins,” “Hanging Around” and “Breaking Up.”

This is petulant rock at its best and teenage angst at its worst, with a good meas

—Cristina Jaleru, Associated Press

WU-TANG CLAN

Album: “A Better Tomorrow

(Warner Bros)

Grade: B

The innovative Wu-Tang Clan arose in 1993 with their menacing album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), in which bone-rattling rhythms, icily spare arrangements, and lyrics rife with martial-arts imagery and cocaine talk defined them. By 2004, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, their most notorious member, was dead. Solo efforts were lame, save for those of Ghostface Killah and RZA. Joint albums were barely existent. Yet despite his career as actor/director, RZA - the group’s sonic manipulator - never ceased trying to unite the Clan’s resistant members. A Better Tomorrow is the brilliant, fuzzy result of his efforts.

There’s change in the Clan’s sound, welcome lush soundscapes with cushiony samples (for example, the title track’s riff on “Wake Up Everybody,” by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes), and soft, vintage R&B vibes, as in the track “Ron O’Neal.” Often, you miss the bluntness of the old recordings, the grimy beats, the cutting voices. They reach back for some of that on tracks such as “Ruckus in B Minor” and “Pioneer the Frontier.” And there’s grit in Raekwon’s coke-filled texts, the nimble raps from GZA and Method Man, an appearance from ODB, and what passes for hopefulness during “Never Let Go,” when RZA snaps, “Never let go of your team.”