What is in a name? In the case of alternative music, a whole lot more than there used to be.

The label of alternative music has been stretched wide to cover a wide variety of sounds that are neither rock, pop nor indie music. The question of whether indie music is nomenclature for a sound instead of simply the branding of a major label only adds another layer of ambiguity.

With R.E.M.’s latest album Accelerate (Warner Bros., April 1), however, that ambiguity is starting to get just a little bit clearer.

The then University of Georgia students dropped out of school after meeting in a record shop and forming the band.

For several years after, the members lived out of a tour ing van until their first single, “Radio Free Europe.”

By 1983, the band’s first album had been named as Rolling Stones‘ Album of the Year, and alternative music had broken out of the college house-party scene and made its way into the mainstream.

Accelerate is a return to the group’s original sound, complemented by a surprising amount of energy for a band nearing its 30-year anniversary.

Several tracks are perfect showcases of the band’s feel and might be the highest-energy singles the band has ever released.

For those familiar with early R.E.M grooves, such as “Living Well is the Best Revenge” and “Supernatural Superserious,” the album’s first and third spots, respectively, will be a two-decade time warp.

For anyone listening to R.E.M. for the first time, a quick recap of the band’s career could be explained by its previously mentioned breakout hit, as well as well-known singles “Losing My Religion,” “Orange Crush” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It.”

The other nine songs on Accelerate possess the same late-’80s, early ’90s authenticity, but are somewhat uneven.

Several of the tracks lack enough individuality to separate them from becoming R.E.M.-flavored white noise. These blander tracks are not poor by any means, and by anyone whose been itching for a fix since the band’s last release, the lackluster and slightly out-of-character Around the Sun, they will surely be welcome.

It’s an easy compliment to say how impressive it is that a band can hold together for the 28 years that R.E.M. has. However, it would be foolish to neglect to notice that a band whose integral role in defining a genre is still capable of bring out the magic when their contemporaries have since left the game-even if the genre is about as descriptive as “contemporary.”