POP/ROCK

Pearl Jam, "Backspacer" (Monkeywrench)

"Backspacer," the band's first studio album outside the major-label system, looks toward rock basics that predate Pearl Jam's beginnings. It's a set of 11 concise songs in 37 minutes that are mostly fast, loud, sinewy and live sounding. Like REM on its 2008 album, "Accelerate," Pearl Jam leans on the throttle and cranks up its guitar riffs, refusing -- mostly -- to equate maturity with slowing down.

While the music hurtles along, Pearl Jam's new songs don't try to fake youthful attitudes or troubles. Eddie Vedder no longer sings about surviving traumas or vents political anger as he did on 2006's "Pearl Jam." Now his lyrics reflect -- sometimes raucously, sometimes pensively -- on a fulfilled life. He flaunts his earnestness in songs like "The Fixer" and in the inspirational crescendos of "Amongst the Waves" and "Unthought Known." Between bursts of adrenaline, Pearl Jam eases back the tempos and considers its age and mortality in the folky "Just Breathe," and in "The End," a dying man's farewell to his wife. Pearl Jam's quandary is that with fewer outside targets or frustrations to rail against, it risks turning sanctimonious. The band's music doesn't align well with satisfaction.

JON PARELES, NEW YORK TIMES

Muse, "The Resistance" (Warner Bros.)

Big problems, real or imagined, weigh heavily on Matthew Bellamy's mind. As the singer and writer of paranoid lyrics for the popular British band Muse, he's honed a worldview centered on apocalyptic and conspiratorial notions. But Bellamy and his mates are preoccupied with a far more dangerous concept on their fifth and crispest album: beauty. The band renders its operatic prog-rock without insularity or undue complexity, allowing Bellamy's voice -- wide, nervous, seductive -- full reign.

Queen is again a touchstone here. But those soaring guitars and hypertrophied vocals are only part of Muse's blend. The band closes this album with an old prog trick, the three-parter "Exogenesis: Symphony," but its melange of the cabaret and the orchestral sounds modest, not audacious. There are flashes of new wave, Depeche Mode and early U2. Like U2, Muse appears willing to sacrifice a touch of specificity -- its last CD, "Black Holes & Revelations," was far more ornery -- in search of something transcendent. Which means that Bellamy's suspicious mind ends up being no more disruptive, really, than Bono's bleeding heart.

JON CARAMANICA, NEW YORK TIMES