Northwest Gig Highlights – June 2013

Big Deal's upcoming June Gloom album may seem appropriate to our clearly climate change-fucked surroundings, but your event horizons look decidedly sunnier with the likes of Splashh, Ólöf Arnalds and MONEY brightening up a venue near you

Preview by Gary Kaill | 29 May 2013

It's June. June! Does anyone know how that happened? Have the elements even noticed? No matter: both Liverpool and Manchester are blessed with a hatful of unmissable gigs this month.

Manchester kicks things off with a difficult choice for indie pop kids on 5 Jun, with Splashh playing Soup Kitchen in advance of the release of debut album Comfort, and Camera Obscura over at Academy 2. Hackney tykes Splashh's psych-influenced guitar attack has led to a formidable live reputation and a raft of glowing reviews, but if you like your indie pop more classically styled, maybe head over to Oxford Road where the return of the Glaswegian stalwarts should be worth a look. Led by the irrepressible Tracyanne Campbell, whose observations on life and love are as candid as they are sardonic, Camera Obscura have quietly become an exceptional live proposition – and new album Desire Lines looks set to continue the popularity they accrued with their fourth record, My Maudlin Career, which was their most successful to date.

Iceland's Ólöf Arnalds makes a welcome return to Manchester on 6 Jun, only two days after her cousin, Ólafur Arnalds, plays at the Royal Northern College of Music on 4 Jun. This year's Sudden Elevation was Ólöf's first English language album, but the chill of her fragile, spartan soundscapes remains – and Icelandic-inspired café Takk on Tariff Street should be the perfect setting for her oblique, baroque compositions. Here's a gig that requires of its audience an extra level of focus and involvement – chatterers beware.

Liverpool hits back with a pair of intriguing shows. Wolf Alice frontwoman Ellie Rowsell is a bewitching presence, and the group's new single Bros references 90s indie favourites Belly and Hole – never a bad thing. Catch them at The Shipping Forecast on 6 Jun. Liverpool's gig highlight of the month, however, is surely MONEY at Leaf on 11 Jun. The band's hometown of Manchester knows them inside out by now, with the four-piece having racked up a series of gigs in oddball venues and on leftfield bills over the past two years – but now it's Liverpool's turn to find out why the buzz surrounding their rise is palpable, and why singer Jamie Lee carries with him more than a sliver of enigma. Expect to hear much of their forthcoming Bella Union debut.

Also on 11 Jun, Big Deal return to Manchester, where the American duo's scuzzed up, lo-fi dream pop – more of it forthcoming on the aptly titled June Gloom – should fit the Soup Kitchen basement to a T. The next night (12 Jun), the same venue welcomes San Francisco's The Fresh & Onlys – perhaps deserving of a bigger slice of the love for all things woozily Californian than they've so far been afforded – before they stop off at Liverpool's East Village Arts Club on 13 Jun as part of a rare UK tour. Their most recent album Long Slow Dance jettisoned psychedelia in favour of a more robust hold on melody, and they've always been a sharp live prospect.

Once upon a time, Pet Shop Boys were permanent chart fixtures – as uncool as any commercially successful major label concern. Nearly three decades on, and they've found themselves scoffing at the fickle demands of fashion and namedropped by numerous next-generation electro innovators. The old men of electro pop are at Manchester Arena on 20 Jun: expect a show.

If you'd like to forget everything you thought you knew about singer-songwriter conventions, pay a visit to David Thomas Broughton, who returns to Salford's Kings Arms pub on 24 Jun with support from Rachael Dadd and Ichi. Broughton's ramshackle approach might at first look ill-advised, but there's daring in the way he tosses his material into the wind, never being quite sure where it will land. Is it folk? Sort of. Perhaps. But Broughton is unique, and deserving of more than lazy compartmentalisation – his compositions are often fragile, but they're robust enough to survive their creator's artful dismantlings. On a similar note, on 1 Jul Liverpool's Leaf hosts Matthew E. White, whose debut Big Inner fuses folk and soul to devastating effect.

Finally this month, promoters Hey Manchester! bring Nancy Elizabeth to the fittingly rarefied International Anthony Burgess Foundation, on 30 Jun (she also plays Leaf, Liverpool, on 20 Jun). The Manchester-based singer will be playing songs from her third album, Dancing, which came about almost by accident; Elizabeth had no firm plans for a new record but, little by little, the songs made themselves known. Dancing adds an electronic sheen to her previous alt-folk explorations – and, backed by her new band, this hometown date concludes a short UK run. Highly recommended.


DO NOT MISS:

The Breeders, The Ritz, Manchester, 18 June
When Kim Deal brings the Last Splash incarnation of The Breeders to town on 18 Jun for the Manchester leg of their LSXX tour, it will mark not only the 20 years since the release of their Last Splash album, but also a smaller, perhaps more meaningful anniversary. Those of us more, ahem, 'experienced' gig-goers try hard to keep the past in perspective, but there are moments in history that laser their place in the memory – and the 4AD 'house' tour which, in 1988, saw Boston's Throwing Muses lay waste to the UK with support from the soon-to-be-huge Pixies is deserving of at least a couple of chapters in the canon. When Deal plugs in that battered Fender Precision and steps out in front of a crowd hungry to hear the likes of Cannonball and Divine Hammer again, it will be 25 years – and just a few days – since she first set foot on a Manchester stage (though the scene of that debut, The International, is of course long gone; The Ritz is a loftier proposition!). Take this opportunity for a rare audience with a genuine indie legend.