The most surprising thing about George Clinton's first album of new material in almost a decade isn't how long it took to arrive; it's that it's not terribly funky. Recorded over several years, How Late sounds alternately like an audio diary and a slow party, long on spoken-word pieces and bland pop-soul numbers that must have begun as cosmic vibrations in the Atomic Dog's cerebellum and never developed much beyond that. A handful of cuts get off on the good foot: "Bounce 2 This" could fit on a mid-Seventies P-Funk record, and the slow-grooving, Prince-assisted "Paradigm" is a bizarrely seductive bit of stoned philosophizing. But excepting old friend Bobby Womack, none of the guest vocalists prove engaging, and lugubrious love songs such as "Saddest Day" point to a serious lack of focus: When a George Clinton album includes not one but several ballads, you know something's rotten in Funkville.

“Time to Pretend”

Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”