The garage rock class of 2001-02 hasn’t fared well.Almost to a band – the Strokes, the Vines, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – their reputations have diminished with the release of their follow-up albums (the one exception being the White Stripes). These bands got ahead because they sounded alike, and now they’re failing because they can’t manage to sound different.

The Hives, who are in concert at Irving Plaza starting Wednesday, seek to avoid this fate on “Tyrannosaurus Hives” (Warner) by stepping up the aggressiveness and trying out a few new sounds.

Some things haven’t changed. The Hives still dresses like a wait staff: white jackets and ties, black shirts and pants, spats. The band still has a weakness for outlandish pronouncements (“we’ll protect you from the forces of evil,” they recently told New Music Express). Singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist still moves like a gumby Mick Jagger. And it’s still true that, like Jack White, anything he shouts sounds like unadulterated rock ‘n’ roll.

Hives songs can be measured in volts per second, and the first two tracks – “Abra Cadaver” and “Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones” – serve it up at a higher rate than did the last album, “Veni Vidi Vicious.” But only 3 minutes and 33 seconds into the album, the familiar sound is already growing stale. The band seems to sense it, too. On the fourth track, Almqvist voices their predicament: “so you look for authenticity / but I can see what is bothering me / the kind you want from long way back in time / it’s been disposable since seventy-nine.”

The metaphor of “Tyrannosaurus Hives” is archeology, excavation. The idea is that the band has unearthed something prehistoric in its sound. I don’t hear it, but the band does exhume several more recent fossils along the way.

The song “A Little More For Little You” has a broken ska beat. “B Is for Brutus” opens with a bit of Dick Dale surf guitar. “Dead Quote Olympics” sounds like Richard Hell’s “Down at the Rock & Roll Club” on a faster setting and a better stereo system. And “See-Through Head” begins with a wild Black Francis-style pronouncement: “I know what you’re thinking / you got a mind and it’s stinking / you know why? / You got a transparent cranium, a see-through head,” shouts Almqvist.

But the album’s biggest departure – and not coincidentally its best moment – is “Diabolic Scheme.” Like the sun-dappled soul of the Strokes’s “Under Control” (off “Room on Fire”), this is the one Hives song that points in a genuinely promising new direction. The vocals sound like David Johansen doing seasick new-wave R&B. There are slasher-flick strings, haunted twangy guitar, a solo that makes a mockery of momentum. The words skid all over on balding tires. It’s not as radio-friendly as paint-by-number hits like “Hate To Say I Told You So,” but it’s far less disposable.

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Like any drug, the mood-altering high of the Polyphonic Spree dulls with repeated use. The 20-plus-member group’s last album had a single setting: ecstatic. It relied on countless crescendos to keep the listener there. “Together We’re Heavy” (Hollywood Records), their sophomore effort, is more balanced and slightly more restrained, inspired by “Hunky Dory”-era David Bowie (with whom the band has been touring) and Beatles-esque transformations.

The album’s centerpiece is “When a Fool Becomes a King,” an epic rock opera that contains a polyphony of moods and scenes in its 10-and-a-half minutes. But for the track listing, it

could be considered three or four songs. It begins with Tim DeLaughter singing “love the life you choose / keep yourself feeling brand new” over a marching drum and radiating horns and flute. A somber instrumental section blossoms into a female chorus chanting a round: “hail to the sky, hail to the sky / it’s time to watch a show, it’s time to watch a show / the trees want to grow, grow grow grow.”

The rest of the song plays out like an LSD-fueled version of the Beatles’s “All You Need Is Love.” DeLaughter shouts like a carnival barker through a bullhorn – “step right up and sign up again / the way to the new world is going to be ours” – while the other members chant “love, love, love” in the background.The song ends (much like “All You Need Is Love”) with a self-reference: a modified chorus of “It’s the Sun” from the last album. DeLaughter and company are still beaming: “Sun and it makes me smile!”

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It began sensibly enough.In the summer of 1989, Laura Balance and Mac McCaughan formed the band Superchunk and the label Merge Records to release their own and other’s music. They ran it out of a bedroom for three years. But in the course of the last 15 years, Merge has become a very big fish in the indie rock pond, breaking countless acts and putting Chapel Hill, N.C., on the college rock map.

To celebrate this mile marker, the label has issued a three-disc set, “Old Enough 2 Know Better,” containing two discs of “Merge Classics” from the back catalog and a third of rare and previously unreleased songs. All the usual suspects are here: indie classics by lo-fi pioneer Neutral Milk Hotel and Superchunk, early Magnetic Fields and late Buzzcocks, and much in between. Underappreciated bands like the Clean, the Ladybug Transistor, and Versus get equal billing with groups that still top college-radio playlists: Spoon, M. Ward, Destroyer.

“Old Enough 2 Know Better” isn’t going to win over the mainstream anytime soon, but it’s a worthwhile listen for the predisposed. For newbies, it’s a surefire way to up your indie-rock IQ; for retired record store clerks, a nostalgic trip down memory lane. But for maximal indie-rock cred, head down to Chapel Hill for Merge’s 15-year concert celebration July 29 to August 1. And don’t forget to buy a T-shirt.