U2

U2

Album: “Songs of Innocence” (Interscope)

Grade: A

Everything about U2’s new album is unexpected. Like it’s very existence, for one, after the Irish rock band dropped it on iTunes users Tuesday in a surprise move.

Then there’s its intriguingly narrow and personal scope. And its playful musical adventurousness, which amounts to a smooth shifting of gears over variable terrain on a road course as the group works through songs inspired by things that seemingly have little to do with each other. Each, however, is an experience from youth and young manhood for singer Bono, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr.

Anthemic opener “The Miracle [of Joey Ramone]” is a tribute to The Ramones, the band that fired Bono’s imagination as a teen. The band wraps punk-like power chords in its usual finery and transforms a monosyllabic garage rock “ohohohoh” chorus into an ethereal gospel-tinged hallelujah. “Everything I ever lost now has been returned, the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard,” Bono sings.

“California [There is No End to Love],” a song about the band’s first trip to Los Angeles, is a modern take on The Beach Boys with a hallucinatory opening consisting of the band chanting “Barbara Barbara Barbara Santa Barbara” in the round before launching into one of those trademark power ballads that feel like a jet plane racing to the horizon.

Along the way, we visit with Bono’s late mother on the soaring “Iris [Hold Me Close],” steal a first kiss on “Song For Someone,” experience terrifying violence in the streets of Dublin on the visceral “Raised By Wolves,” visit the old neighborhood on the wonderfully bombastic “Cedarwood Road” and take their life’s mission from The Clash on the funky and bright “This is Where You Can Reach Me Now.”

The album was produced by Danger Mouse with assistance from others, including Adele collaborators Paul Epworth and Ryan Tedder and longtime U2 associate Flood. Their fingerprints are all over the place — there’s baroque synthesizer throughout, jangling ghost guitars and a general retro feel to the rhythm section. But even with all those outside collaborators in the room, it remains a distinctly U2 record — soaring, upbeat and often transcendent.

—Chris Talbott, Associated Press

Ryan Adams

Album: “Ryan Adams” (Pax Am/Blue Note)

Grade: B-

Ryan Adams says that before he wrote and recorded his new, self-titled album, he scrapped an entirely different record he’d completed with the esteemed English producer Glyn Johns, who earlier had overseen Adams’ “Ashes & Fire” from 2011.

No surprise there: At 39, Adams already has made more music than many artists twice his age. What’s unexpected about “Ryan Adams,” however, is how even-tempered it feels.

The 11-track set has a bigger, more forceful sound than the acoustic “Ashes & Fire”; “Kim” even crests with a noisy guitar solo by Johnny Depp, one of many luminaries known to drop by regularly at Adams’ Hollywood recording studio.

But the handsome melodic hooks and sturdy roots-music grooves, some of which are downright Tom Petty-ish, provide a hard-won equilibrium in songs about searching for relief from unspecified ailments.

—Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times