R.E.M. surprised the music world this morning by announcing an imminent new studio album, Charged. It will be released on their own record label, Around The Sun, on Friday 6^th April via Spotify and iTunes, as well as a vinyl version distributed through record shops.

The announcement was made via singer Michael Stipe’s press office which shared the album cover art and released the following brief statement:

Hie thee to Oxford, for it is doubtful that we will see the like of this exhibition again this side of the Atlantic. American art of the 1920s and 1930s was once disregarded in its homeland in favour of Francophile superiority, and once it fell into critical and commercial favour it became too expensive to move around at the beckoning of would-be international hosts.

An album that enchants and surprises in equal measure, Heritage sees US sax player and composer Owen Broder explore the full gamut of American roots music – from blues and Appalachian folk to bluegrass and spirituals – through the prism of modern jazz.

It rather surprising to note that Mary Chapin Carpenter turned 60 earlier this year, which means she’s been making records for half her life, around in ours for 30 years – but it seems like yesterday. She has wisely resisted the album-a-year treadmill, which means that in assembling the “reimaginings” of songs from her back catalogue for Sometimes Just the Sky, she had a dozen studio albums to choose from.

There were empty seats at Cadogan Hall on Thursday night which was a crying shame, for Beth Nielsen Chapman was in town and she played a wonderful set, full of warmth and charm and powerful singing, her voice always true and expressive. Chapman is one of those artists who seems completely at home on stage – casual, natural, down-to-earth, creating the intimate atmosphere of Nashville’s Bluebird Café.

The delicious flame-grilled burgers and the vast array of bourbons on offer at the Lexington, hard by yet another “King's Cross Quarter”, added atmosphere to the opening night of Diana Jones’s European tour. Finger licking is (quite rightly) not allowed during the music so those arriving early for a bite might have spotted Jones herself, refuelling with friends between sound-check and curtain-up.

Is it possible to get too much of American politics?

For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' greatest success in the grunge years.

Like all The Breeders' albums, this is short, as are the songs: 12 of them in 34 minutes. Yet each takes you places within its structure. There are obvious festival anthems, like the high-speed “Wait in the Car” with its stop-starts and “woah-oh woah-oh”s, and “MetaGoth” which almost sounds like a conscious Pixies nod with its one-note basslines playing off detuned Duane Eddy surf twang and shrieking lead guitar. But these are full of lyrical puzzles, snappy twists and odd tuning that could only be this band: nothing is obvious.

And when things brood, it's not like the slightly fuzzy drift of the last Breeders album Mountain Battles (2008): everything on “Walking with the Killer” and “Blues at the Acropolis” fairly crackles with energy and invention, and delight in the hum and buzz from misusing guitars and amplification, always in the pursuit of that ever-present strangeness. Lyrics are terse, full of repeated phrases, but every so often throwing up something eerily evocative like “junkies of the world lay across the monuments” or “I polish my scales and get nearer and nearer”. The title makes absolute sense: this feels like the work of people open to every sensation, all edges sharp, everything new and unfamiliar, even as they make no attempt to escape the sound they created all those years ago – a bit like John Peel said of the late Mark E Smith and The Fall: “always different; they are always the same.”

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@JoeMuggs

Overleaf: watch the reunited Breeders play 1993's 'Drivin' on 9'