Setting aside the grand orchestrations of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, Devendra Banhart’s What Will We Be is everything its predecessor was not: straight-forward, cleanly produced, consistently laid-back (to nearly Jack Johnson proportions), and free of ambition. Banhart enlists the same band as last time (Noah Georgeson, Greg Rogove, Luckey Remington, and Rodrigo Amarante), but hired production whiz Paul Butler, whose records with A Band of Bees are some of the most striking productions of the 2000s.       

      Broadcast’s music has always been a little unearthly, so Broadcast & the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age isn’t so much a departure as it is an inspired homage to their influences. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and its alternately innocent and menacing soundtrack inspired the band years before the movie was rediscovered. The whimsy and strangely familiar feel of ’60s and ’70s library music could also be heard in their music from the beginning, but never more clearly than on this mini-album.       

      Getting right back to where they started from, Creed reunites for Full Circle, putting all tensions — including whatever unpleasantry existed with their long-departed original bassist Brian Marshall — to rest and cutting their first album in eight years. Full Circle is a none-too-subtle allusion to how they’re getting back to their beginnings, but a cynic could say they never got much past it, toiling the same weathered ground on each of their albums, but this bears some subtle differences, particularly in how Creed sounds heavier yet more open than they did in the past.       

      By a Thread is Gov’t Mule’s first studio album since High & Mighty was issued in 2006. Since that time, bassist Andy Hess has been replaced by Jorgen Carlsson, though Hess appears on two tracks at the end of the album. Ensconced at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio outside of Austin, the band recorded from the ground up and wrote everything in the studio. It’s right; it’s big and fat and nasty.       

      On their third album, 2009′s Midnight Soul Serenade, Heavy Trash keep delivering the good old rock & roll, rockabilly, and hillbilly soul that their first two albums handed out like candy at a Fourth of July parade. Jon Spencer and Matt Verta-Ray hit their stride right away on their debut and continue to be nothing short of great. They make no great changes to their sound here; it’s still loose as geese on the rockers and pleasantly spooky on the ballads.       

      An important thing to remember when considering the soundtrack to This Is It: this entire film and CD project was never supposed to happen. This Is It was designed as a comeback tour, not a movie, with the rehearsals taped not for exhibition, but rather instruction, possibly some video bonus down the line. Of course, Michael Jackson’s tragic passing created considerable demand for those final rehearsals (no need to get into the financial need, as well), so they were packaged as the This Is It film, released almost five months after his death, with a soundtrack as an accompaniment. Since there were no real live recordings made, at least not any to fill a big-budget blockbuster like this, the soundtrack consists of almost nothing but the hits repackaged one more time, with the title track — an ’80s leftover, co-written by Paul Anka and released under the name “I Never Heard” by Safire — added as an enticement in two separate versions, the second being orchestral with an opening straight out of Sgt. Pepper’s.       

      Dolly Parton’s story is mighty but it’s never properly been told on record until this 2009 Legacy box set. Spanning 99 tracks over four discs, beginning with the early-’60s demo “Gonna Hurry (As Slow as I Can)” and running until the end of her stay with Columbia in the early ’90s, Dolly may miss her bluegrass comeback of the new millennium but this is the only gap in the narrative, and it’s not greatly missed, because this captures her prime.       

      ”This is not a show,” murmurs Michael Stipe at the start of Live at the Olympia and it’s not quite misdirection. R.E.M.’s five-night residency at Dublin’s Olympia in the summer of 2007 functioned as working rehearsals for their fourteenth album Accelerate, with the band testing out each of the songs, exploring arrangements, finding breaking points, and pairing them with older songs that informed their back-to-basics move. As rehearsal, it paid off splendidly — road-testing the material made it stronger, resulting in their best album in years — but the audience was in for a real treat, with the band digging deep into their back catalog to play some of their best non-hit songs.       

      When Once hit theaters in 2007, Glen Hansard had already pursued international acclaim for more than 15 years with the Frames. Although popular in Ireland, the singer’s music wasn’t nearly as omnipresent in other countries until the movie’s release, which catapulted former Frames tunes like “Falling Slowly” into the spotlight. The Once soundtrack was also a big hit, turning Hansard’s side project with simpatico songwriter MarkИta IrglovА into a full-fledged, award-winning, globetrotting band. While playing international venues and attending industry award shows, the two attracted additional attention for their real-life relationship, which effectively replaced Once‘s semi-tearful conclusion with a storybook ending. Released two years after the film’s release, however, Strict Joy finds Hansard and IrglovА going their separate ways, choosing to end their relationship while remaining in the same band.       

      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, and the simplest just containing the CD. That second CD rounds up all of the stray, mid-’80s tracks from U2, most notably all of the Wide Awake in America EP (strangely, the studio cuts “Love Comes Tumbling” and “The Three Sunrises” are swapped in the running order) and two previously unreleased tracks — the moody “Disappearing Act,” and the instrumental “Yoshino Blossom” — that both feel like incomplete outtakes.       

      Swapping out his rhythm section, Andrew Stockdale proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s the mastermind of Wolfmother on Cosmic Egg, creating a second record that is essentailly 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.