What Will We Be

Devendra Banhart What Will Be (Warner Bros.)
It’s everything its predecessor was not: straight-forward, cleanly produced, consistently laid-back (to nearly Jack Johnson proportions) and free of ambition.

Morningwood Diamonds and Studs (Morningwood)
Riff-shredding, lovably raunch-friendly rockers. They mold elements of hard-rock, punk, new wave and glam rock into a sex-driven amalgam of unstoppable sound.

Tegan and Sara Sainthood
Their sixth studio album addresses secular themes of devotion, delusion and exemplary behavior in the pursuit of love and relationships.

Wolfmother Cosmic Egg (DGC/Interscope/Modular)

Swapping out his rhythm section, Andrew Stockdale proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s the mastermind of Wolfmother, creating a second record that is essentially a replication of the first, equally enamored with all the thick, heavy rock of the ’70s, specifically Sabbath and Zeppelin, tempered with a little bit of Jack White caterwaul.

R.E.M. Live at the Olympia [2CD/1DVD] (Warner Bros.)
R.E.M.’s five-night residency at Dublin’s Olympia in 2007 functioned as working rehearsals for their fourteenth album Accelerate.

U2 The Unforgettable Fire [Super Deluxe Edition] (Island/Universal)
Like The Joshua Tree before it, The Unforgettable Fire is given a lavish multimedia overhaul in its deluxe reissue treatment, with the fanciest edition containing a bonus CD plus a bonus DVD

Michael Jackson Michael Jackson’s This Is It (Epic)

Sources: AMG, InSound