Three First Listens

NPR music is streaming early three albums I'm anticipating for Fall, which seems to have even more blockbuster releases than Spring did. Volcano Choir, Justin Vernon's new project, will whet the appetite of every Bon Iver fan.

In ambition and in quality, Repave sits closer on the spectrum to 2011's Bon Iver than it does to Unmap, and both of those records were terrific to begin with. Vernon's lyrics, while characteristically oblique, are largely decipherable here, as the players around him — guys he's admired since well before he broke through himself — work wonders in arrangements that swell and boom. Where it loses some of Unmap's dreamy, nonlinear ambiguity, Repave gains Bon Iver's tendency toward impeccably fussed-over majesty. As the grandiosity of "Byegone" gives way to the enchantingly delicate "Alaskans," it's clear that chunks of Repave could have been plopped into Bon Iver without seeming out of place.

Franz Ferdinand has reemerged, and it'll perk you up after Volcano Choir. Followed by the fabulous Neko Case, whose album "tucks thrills into its margins and doles them out in time-release doses. As her subtle touches suddenly cohere and register as surprises six or eight listens later (wait, are those submarine noises?), it's clear that Case remains essentially peerless: No one sounds like her, so every little revelation feels altogether new."

Going to be a good Fall.