If Dan Snaith has mastered one aspect of his music career, it's change. Not the remodeling or renovation sort, more the alterations and adaptations with purpose. The steady upward progression in replayability between 2001's glitchy Start Breaking My Heart and 2005's towering Milk of Human Kindness feels like a problem of some sort was solved. Which makes room for the comparative left-turn of Andorra, which both felt like a huge surprise (songs!) and a logical extension (songs with insane drumming!) of what he'd always been doing.

Just when you thought that R.E.M.’s three-legged dog don’t hunt no more, in "Accelerate" they turn in their most powerful and cohesive work since 1992’s "Automatic for the People", a record brimming with all the things that made them great in the first place: clangy autumnal melodies, droney proto-emo vocals, trippy nuance, the haunted poetics of regret, the routine eschewing of the obvious and the familiar in pursuit of the sublime and the unexpected.