This Is The Kit, On tour
Kate Stables is part of an honourable tradition of indie rock artists: a little bit bookish, seemingly a little bit fragile, yet working some fundamental tenets of compelling rock'n'roll. It's a trait you can see she shares with the likes of the National (who recently booked her to play at their own ATP festival), and particularly with PJ Harvey. Certainly, it's not a particular surprise to learn that Harvey's longtime collaborator John Parish produced This Is The Kit's debut album a few years ago. What's more impressive, though, is to hear another similarity. As with Harvey, there's often a clanging, bluesy directness to her songs, and a wonderful clarity to her voice that shines through them regardless of how they're arranged, be that acoustic and violiny or, as recently, stripped right down for dance-influenced remixes. A case of strong words, softly spoken, all round.
Latest MusicBar, Brighton, Sat; Lexington, N1, Sun; The Hop, Wakefield, Fri
John Robinson
Big Sexy Noise, London
Lydia Lunch is one of those people who are interesting whatever stage of their career you catch them at. The queen of the late-1970s No Wave movement with her band Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Lunch brought a powerful, highly sexualised persona to a fleeting but influential loftspace scene that was, in the main, dominated by arty free-noise skronk. Into the 1980s, Lunch found kindred spirits among musicians like Sonic Youth (with whom she collaborated on their awesome screamfest Death Valley '69) and with Nick Cave, Rowland S Howard and other proponents of noisy, blues-derived gothabilly, within whose pulp fiction tales she found much to respond to. It's that end of things that she's mining with her current band Big Sexy Noise. Here, in partnership with free-blowing Londoners like Gallon Drunk members James Johnson and Terry Edwards, Lunch has found a viable second home. Lunch takes centre-stage in a post-Courtney Love grunge noise cabaret, the aggression of the performance only matched by the wildness of the playing.
The Lexington, N1, Fri
JR
Happy Mondays, Manchester
For baggy revivalists, this year will be remembered chiefly for the reunited Stone Roses, whose wide trousers and retro 1960s pop songs caught the mood of 1990 – and again, much against the odds and rather alarmingly, of 2012. The reunion of the original Happy Mondays, however, has been an occasion rather less trumpeted, which seems a little unfair. Of course, little since the band's acrimonious demise in 1992 has seemed to promise much more than the kind of opportunistic cash-in for which the band, in more villainous days, were famed. Still, it's worth remembering that this was by far the more adventurous act, in that the lifestyle and the music that emerged from it were completely inseparable; a group whose members created, from their source ingredients of repetition and schoolyard nonsense, something genuinely modern, inspiring and, at times, downright bizarre. The future most likely holds TV celebrity for a post-jungle Shaun Ryder, but for now this will be a riotous homecoming, which follows two dates at the Roundhouse down in London's Camden Town.
Victoria Warehouse, Manchester, Sat
JR
Courtney Pine, London
By jazz music's sometimes taciturn standards, Courtney Pine is thrillingly effervescent artist, but at root he's a serious man. Inquisitive both spiritually and culturally, Pine consistently probes the artistic implications of being an African-Caribbean Briton but, as a virtuoso jazz reeds player with an appetite for dance music, he's able to enthuse and entertain all kinds of audiences on the way. Pine's 2011 Europa project brought together jazz, reggae, Gregorian chants, Balkan music and more. His latest venture House Of Legends has a much more specific Caribbean feel, mixing merengue, ska, mento and calypso grooves with jazz. There's plenty of vibrant party music in themes like the jaunty Kingstonian Swing, or the Sonny Rollins-like calypsos Liamuiga (Cook Up).
The Hideaway, SW16, Sat & Sun
John Fordham
Liane Carroll, On tour
For more than 20 years, British singer-pianist Liane Carroll was known to small audiences in the UK as a powerful, soul-inflected performer with an emotional frankness on ballads, but plenty of less-gifted singers got their names in brighter lights than her. It took until 2005 for the artist to start collecting major prizes (winning two BBC jazz awards that year), and until 2010 for her to get world-class treatment on a recording session, which produced her album Up And Down. Two of these Christmas gigs are on Carroll's south coast home turf, and playing unaccompanied in such intimate settings remains one of the best ways to hear her, whether she's applying a muscular roughness to Tom Waits songs, or swinging on uptempo bebop. The free Southbank show, meanwhile, features the singer with her regular trio partners Roger Carey and Mark Fletcher.
The Brunswick, Hove, Sun; Porters Wine Bar, Hastings, Christmas Eve; Clore Ballroom at the Southbank Centre, SE1, Fri
JF
