The Hives

The Black and White Album

(Interscope)

The Hives rose to popularity during the garage revival but, much like the Strokes and the White Stripes, managed to outlive the trend. This survival could be attributed to the Hives' addictive sound. They weren't relying on the blues like the White Stripes or the selling power of pretension like the Strokes. Instead they merely found a way to turn everything up to 10 while they chugged through no-frills rockers that were catchy enough to make you sing along while dancing around your room or drumming on your steering wheel.

It's this same sound that makes half of The Black and White Album such an invigorating listen, while the other half gets tripped up on strange genre-dabbling. Opener "Tick Tick Boom," along with tracks like "Try it Again" and "Return the Favour," are classic Hives. Each is a propulsive, trebly rocker that acts as a rallying cry for the overstimulated. On the other side of the coin comes the embarrassing, cabaret-flavored "Well Alright!" and "Puppet on a String," the cheese funk of "T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S.," and the B-52s-gone-awry of "Giddy Up." Not all the experimenting goes wrong. The '50s rock-influenced "You Got It... All" is a cheeky fireball of fun, but it's still not enough to conceal the missteps. - Matt Whelihan

Grizzly Bear

Friend EP

(Warp Records)

Edward Droste is clearly not a control freak. After self-recording the bulk of the Grizzly Bear debut, Horn of Plenty, he recruited multi-instrumentalist Christopher Bear to give that album more shape and diversity. Prior to recording Yellow House, Droste expanded the band to a four-piece, adding another multi-dude (Chris Taylor) as well as another full-on songwriter, Daniel Rossen. The resultant House was a far more advanced piece than the debut, with the extra instrumentation and increased fidelity giving the band a much more expansive sound.

As if any more evidence of Droste's lack of control freakness was necessary, the Friend EP provides plenty more. Here, the band completely re-works Horn of Plenty's "Alligator" (and improves on it immeasurably) as well as "Shift," and lets a couple of "friends" (hence the title) provide covers of GB tracks. Band of Horses re-imagines Yellow House highlight "Plans" as a jaunty hoedown (and confirms the country leanings of their second album), and "Knife" gets diverse treatments from CSS and Atlas Sound (aka Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, who answers the long-standing question of who is the whitest guy with the skinniest ass in indie rock). But the finest moments belong to the Bear, as its cover of the Crystals' classic abuse anthem "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" is revelatory, and the electric version of "Little Brother" comes closer to the band's unrestrained live performances than does the somewhat claustrophobic earlier take. Droste's delegation of responsibility continues to be a strength, allowing GB and Friend room to succeed. - Chris Drabick

Streetlight Manifesto

Somewhere in the Between

(Victory)

By now you know what to expect from a ska-punk album. There are the speedy, up-stroked guitars, big energetic horn lines, an impressive rhythm section and a front man that must do his best to keep up with the frenzied state of affairs going on around him. In regards to Streetlight Manifesto's sophomore album, the band can safely check off all these prerequisites. It's a record full of bombast and exuberance that'll give ska fans another reason to dance and shout along with a fist in the air.

The problem is that casual listeners of the genre will find Somewhere in the Between is just a bit too akin to other gruff ska-punkers like Catch 22 (a band singer Tomas Kalnoky was formerly in) or Big D and the Kid's Table. On Somewhere in the Between you'll find your speedy rabble rousers ("Down, Down, Down to Mephisto's Café," "The Receiving End of It All"), songs with a bit more swing ("Somewhere in the Between," "Forty Days") and even an attempt at a ballad ("One Foot on the Gas, One Foot in the Grave"), but they're all just a bit too familiar. Like I said, you know what to expect here. - MW

LCD Soundsystem

Nike commissioned LCD Soundsystem to come up with a mix designed to accompany a jogging workout. And if you've ever seen the mastermind behind the band (James Murphy), you can probably tell that he's not exactly the jogging type. So the premise behind 45:33 is kind of ridiculous. But that didn't stop Murphy from playing along with Nike's plan (and cash) to craft a continuous piece of music he's likened to E2-E4 by Manuel Göttsching (aka "the record that basically created modern techno music"). The running time is actually 45:58 (the album's title is a nod to the RPMs of slabs of vinyl), which would make Goldilocks happy. It's not too long or too short. It's just right.

The standout, "Someone Great," makes up a healthy portion of the mix's first 15 minutes, and the signature synth line keeps popping up again throughout. After that extended instrumental section is over, it switches to a synth-heavy take on the kind of material Ze Records released in the early '80s. There's plenty of funky guitar, soulful female vocals, horns and even a distorted Murphy monologue where he sounds a bit like George Clinton. The last few minutes are a blissed-out comedown. While a mash-up of Murphy's finest tracks would've been cool on a certain level, 45:33 is much more than something rote. It succeeds in its intended purpose as a full-length piece of music. And sure, you can jog to it if you want to. The CD version of 45:33 contains a few b-sides that weren't available when this mix was released on iTunes earlier this year. - Jeremy Willets

REWIND: REISSUES AND COLLECTIONS

Various Artists

The Heavy Metal Box

(Rhino)

These days, metal, like all other genres, is divided into countless subcategories: thrash, grind, glam, nü, metalcore - and the list goes on ad infinitum. If there's an overreaching message behind Rhino's new four-disc The Heavy Metal Box, it's that during metal's infancy and adolescence, everyone from Montrose to Metallica to Manowar were united by one common goal: the burning desire to play music that was louder, heavier and more aggressive than the bands that came before them.

Consisting of five hours of remastered music that was recorded exclusively from 1968-1991, The Heavy Metal Box contains plenty of the obvious suspects such as Kiss' "Detroit Rock City" and Twisted Sister's "I Wanna Rock." But the music buffs at Rhino also include nascent metal tracks like Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and Uriah Heep's "Easy Livin," which seamlessly illustrate where the movement started and show the genre's progression over the past four decades. Kudos also go out to Rhino for including excessively long tracks, like the Iron Maiden's "The Phantom of the Opera" and Metallica's "One," both over seven minutes long. Ditto for the amazing packaging, which is a painstaking recreation of a Marshall head, the very amplifier that helped birth the New Wave of Heavy Metal in Britain in the early '80s. It's this kind of attention to detail and historical accuracy that makes The Heavy Metal Box stand out from the myriad Monster Ballad compilations - and for true metalheads, this will be both a snapshot of their lives as well as a history lesson. - Jonah Bayer