British agit-rocker Billy Bragg will venture across the pond this September to play a short U.S. tour following his slot at Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival over Labor Day Weekend.

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey joined Pearl Jam in Berlin last night to rip through the MC5’s classic ‘Kick Out the Jams’ at a concert that also featured the Seattle rockers debuting a new cover of Public Image Ltd.’s ‘Public Image.’

The Pixies continue to map out a busy 2010, with newly announced plans to follow up the band’s second round of U.S. ‘Doolittle’ concerts with a string of Latin American shows this October in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

Beck’s Record Club — this time featuring Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and post-rock combo Tortoise — tonight unveiled the next album it will cover song-by-song: Yanni’s ‘Live at the Acropolis.’

Fans who shelled out big cash for the just-issued mega-deluxe edition of U2’s new ‘U2 360° at the Rose Bowl’ concert DVD received a nice bonus: a red-vinyl 7-inch single featuring the previously unreleased song ‘Soon,’ a 2-minute track left over from the ‘No Line on the Horizon’ sessions.

XTC’s Andy Partridge today announced the band will reissue 1986’s ‘Skylarking’ on double vinyl ‘as it was intended to sound, but never has due to human error.’ No release date has been announced, nor plans for another CD reissue.

The debut album from Julian Cope’s neo-psychedelic band The Teardrop Explodes — 1980’s ‘Kilimanjaro’ — is due to receive an expansive 3CD reissue next month, along with Cope’s 1993 compilation of post-Teardrop recordings entitled ‘Floored Genius 2: Best of the BBC Sessions 1983-1991.’

With the expanded reissue of R.E.M.’s third album, 1985’s ‘Fables of the Reconstruction,’ now just two weeks away, the folks at Capitol/I.R.S. are starting to give fans a taste of some of the 14 previously unreleased demos that will make up the second disc of the set.

British hard-rockers The Cult will take their Love Live Tour — during which the band has been performing its 1985 classic ‘Love’ in its entirety — back to Europe this summer for a 14-date run of festivals and theater shows.

The briefly reunited Yazoo — or Yaz, as the Vince Clarke/Alison Moyet group was known here in the U.S. — today unveiled the tracklist for ‘Reconstructed Live,’ the 20-song document of its 2008 reunion tour.

The Houston, Texas-based Catastrophic Theatre is working with Pixies frontman Black Francis to adapt his 2007 solo album ‘Bluefinger’ — a concept record about the life and death of Dutch rocker and painter Herman Brood — into a rock opera set to debut this fall.

This week’s new releases include ‘Dum Dum Bullet,’ a posthumous compilation from The Mission UK featuring rare B-sides, demos and unreleased material; ‘Box Set 1,’ an audiophile vinyl set from the Cocteau Twins; and expanded reissues of Madness’ ‘The Rise & Fall’ and ‘Keep Moving.’

‘Dark Wave’ on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave continues to impress by digging somewhat deeper than normal, with tonight’s episode featuring unexpected cuts from the likes of The Cure (‘The Baby Screams’), The Smiths (‘The Hand That Rocked the Cradle’) and Ministry (‘Flashback’).