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Slow Club and Brakes The Fuzz Club at University Union, Sheffield

"The Killers also have a single out called Spaceman, but" says the silver suit clad short singer of Brakes Eamon Hamilton "erm, I like ours better."

Brakes are a funny band. The question is what sort of funny are they?

Certainly they are not the funny which Slow Club represent. The aspiring Sheffield based duo are a curious mix of Noah and the Whale style pop/folk and a bluesy edge that sounds straight out of a Dad's record collection. They are good too - bordering on very good - and Because We're Dead has a delicious edge to it with boy/girl vocals pushing around the stage playfully.

One is left with the feeling that Slow Club might end up making an album that is all last tracks from White Stripes records - It's True That We Love One Another/I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)/Effect And Cause and wondering if that would be brilliantly amusing or eventually annoying. Or both.

Brakes take to the stage with determination the three instrument men kicking into a new tune before the dominative Hamilton leaps to the middle of the stage rid of the pale, casual jumper he watched the support band wearing and in what can only be described as a shiny silver spacesuit. As he sings he closes his eyes and smiles nervously forward, not embarrassed so much as spiked by the moment and afraid that should he look out to the audience he would gaze on faces who simply did not get the joke.

Hamilton's songs breakdown in two ways. He has a good line in honest love songs - No Return being his best but is sadly missing from the set tonight - and he has a brand spiky politically aware songs the apotheosis of which is the eight second burst of Cheney which is modified with the happy word "Goodbye" appended. The former is standard fair - highly enjoyable fair, but standard - while the latter is rare in indie music which tonight we are defining as being what is played to the kids at Sheffield University Union.

The opening gives way to familiar ground - this gig is a warm up for the tour to support new album Touchdown but only a handful of 2009's tracks are played - so we are quickly into familiar ground with Margarita and The Most Fun. A lively group of lads begin to mosh during Spring Chicken and get jumpy in Cease And Desist and Porcupine Or Pineapple where Brakes are at their most curious, their funniest.

The set ups - God and the Devil playing cards, a war between spined creatures and fruit - are comical but the points made are more political, more interesting. Hamilton's presentation of his ideals as the comical is the musical equivalent of political cartooning seducing one into attention and to his message with a cheeky smile and an amusing bit of imagery. In that way Brakes live - with the built up sound that enables them to do All Night Disco Party lose something in the telling compared to Hamilton's solo shows that draw his cartoons in more sketched black and white than full colour.

However they make up for that with some fine thrashing on the guitar with On Your Side sounding grand and newbie Eternal Return booming brilliantly. Of the new offerings Crystal Tunings closes the set and is menacingly excellent while Hey Hey has an ebullient joy about it that guitarist Tom White revels in. Spaceman - or Don't Take me to Space (Man) to give a fuller name - saddles the two sides of Brakes better than any other song they have telling a story of alien abduction, seemingly friendly, but rejected cause despite all the corruption of the world Hamilton sees he has found a girl to hold hands with.

The guitarist makes a comment about Lloyds TSB being shaping shifting lizards and that David Icke was right after which Hamilton correction to White's laugher "There are a couple of holes in his arguments..."

Brakes are that kind of funny.

Micky P. Kerr and Chris Helme at The Faversham, Leeds

Micky P Kerr

There is a charm about Micky P Kerr as he takes to the sizable Faversham stage shunning his guitar and sitting on a high chair starting with poetry but he doesn't get anywhere with people talking and laughing at the back he shuns the serious forgetting the second verse of his Credit Crunch Christmas poem and running through the song I'm in awe of you eager to get onto what he calls his silly songs.

The charming humour of the shambling poet is lost and Kerr - who admits a hostility to the buffonlike hecklers - tries to pass himself off as arrogant with tongue-in-cheek but aim askew. One can imagine that on other nights he goes down a storm but not on this Sunday evening in Leeds.

Chris Helme

Leeds's Faversham is - according to Chris Helme so cool you have to wear an overcoat and the former Seahorses front man's new brand of bluesy guitaring is yoked into something altogether more honest.

Helme is an interesting performer in the midst of reclaiming his back catalogue from the monstrous ego of John Squire that haunts his past. He plays through a good chunk of his 1990s offerings musing that Blinded By the Sun was written when he was 23 in Brighton and that he is surprised anyone wants to hear it. He is less pleased to have to play the obviously Squire Love Is the Law but does do to earn the freedom to run through stomp Be My Husband and the Lorali.

It is then that Helme seems most comfortable for sure but he takes requests for Seahorses B-Sides - "Funny, my songs always ended up as B-sides" - and is pleased to play them slowly clawing back as his own each one.

Here at Dalliance we like to wait until the end of the year before reviewing it and we like to review it in an ad-hoc set of lists so for you, Dear Reader, we have albums of the year which is a general summary of what we have been listening to, tracks of the year which is more about the sort of thing we have been listening to while hanging around West Yorkshire at local gigs and gigs of the year which take in Bradford, Manchester, New York and Halifax.

Enjoy and thank you, kindly thank you, for reading.

• Dalliance Albums of 2008 - Sober, life is a prison…
• Dalliance Tracks of 2008 - My name and your name inside a heart shape…
• Dalliance Gig of 2008 - And I think that I know the bitter dismay of a lover who brought fresh bouquets every day…

Okkervil River at Academy 3, Manchester

The stage of Manchester's Academy 3 is too small for Okkervil River.

For sure the six Americans fill the stage - a couple of them make up for the brawn lost in the slighter members - and for sure the multi-instrumental nature that sees guys playing keyboard them swapping to guitar and girls playing anything with strings on it adds clutter but this band are barely able to be contained by such small surroundings.

Okkervil River's singer/songwriter Will Sheff - resplendent in cheap funeral suit and a shocked mop of dark hair picked out against the stage lights - has the kind of charisma that one finds in a Morrissey or a Michael Stipe.

Sheff kicks his band into Plus Ones with the same faltering, ethereal way Stipe had around the time of R.E.M.'s fifth release Document. Comparisons are justified but the band's effort - Pop Lie - suggests they have been noted as does second effort of the night Singer/Songwriter.

Honesty is all here - The liar who lies in his song/And you're lying when you sing along - and Sheff exudes it.

The band's weight of back catalogue inspires devotees and so the songs familiar to most - new release The Stand Ins is their fifth - but are imbued with a freshness from phrasing and playfulness that rebirths every one.

Sheff has the air of practised raconteur telling a new story for the first time. Breathlessly, almost struggling to keep order of his thought as they spill into his songs, he brings a relevance and significance to his performance that fills every word, every line, with life.

No Key, No Plan - a hidden gem on Black Sheep Boy Appendix - which is rattled through with exuberance to the refrain Truly, I don’t think you'll find a happier man giving way to the jaw dropping moment of this gig. The stand out moment of any gig for this reviewer.

A Stone is stripped down to a three piece lament which in turn breaks down to Sheff himself, on stage, cast against white back light finishing off first with guitar and then just a voice. I think that I know the bitter dismay of a lover who brought/fresh brouquets every day/when she turned him away/to remember some knave/who once gave/just one rose [silence, pause] one day [silence, pause] and it was years ago

The sound could have been a pin dropping. A heart breaking. A million gigs colliding together into a single moment of perfection.

Then you see the bulbous eyes that Sheff casts over the room pushed out and puffed from crying too many tears. You see the scratches on Sheff's guitar where the pick has dragged on the upstroke in frantisism, in the need to play these songs right now, in the fact that he, that Okkervil River, really mean it.

They mean the intelligence as well as the emotion. They mean the smart and the heart. These are the things that make them exceptional.

That tattered acoustic guitar of Sheff is thrashed through an anthemic version of For Real and a mesmerised audience are wrapped and as requested clap in speedy time, then slower during Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe which for many gigs should be, would be the highlight.

Not tonight though. Tonight Okkervil River are a many facetted band. Lost Coastlines' banjo beginning and second singing by bassist Patrick Pestorius hits as close to perfection as any band gets

John Allen Smith Sails's Sloop John B close is the most exciting thing you've ever seen as it unfurls before you. In Starry Stairs they are playful cutting down sound to allow tape recording of Shannon Wilsey's voice haunting the room. No bookend with Savannah Smiles is the closest to a criticism I can manage.

Too quickly the night starts to end. They leave returning for a mellow, heartfelt, touching Girl In Port that seals the evening breathing in the life, the understanding, the reason why people still play live after the intention of the phonograph. Sheff bleeds the lines I'm a weak and lonely sort/but I'm not sailing just for sport/.../these several year out on the sea/left me empty cold and grey/pour yourself into me.

They close with their Okkervil River Song. They could be anything this band - and a new lexicon is needed to describe how good they were tonight - but they will never be so on the cusp again.

Commercially, creatively, critically anything is possible with wells of song writing and performance this deep.

Okkervil River are the stand out live act of this decade. Wow.

Camera Obscura at The Faversham, Leeds

Camera Obscura

Some performances are enthralling. They excite you and leave you breathless as a band bring surprises and come to life in a way that one does not expect. They take the 2D grooves and pits of the record and become sparklingly 3D. It breaks my heart that Camera Obscura are not one of those bands.

They filter onto the stage to start the set with Come Back Margaret and everything is a factor more fuzzed up than on any of the albums which have seen this Scots band carve out an appreciated niche in the world of the cynically twee.

The lack of pop polish lends a rawness that suits Tears for Affairs but on other tunes it sits uncomfortably with a lack of presence on stage. They are cramped onto a stage without filling it. They are lost voices which should be working into every nook and cranny of The Faversham.

They play new tracks which sound very much like the previous material but unlike - for example - the excited life given to New Directions by Jens Lekman these will sound better from CD in a few months time than they do tonight.

They fail to communicate the emotions that go behind songs like Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken or Razzle Dazzle Rose like a playwright who needs word to be read by actors but are warmly applauded for their efforts - they put all they can into performance - and but one cannot help but be left with the feeling that those efforts will produce magic in the studio that is not there tonight.