The story goes that Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero played in a thrash metal band in their native Mexico. Presumably having failed to thrash the charts the band split, jettisoning our nimble-fingered duo to Dublin, the buskers’ paradise. There they were spotted and snagged by the festival circuit. Massive success followed, with an album produced by none other than John Leckie.

At times it seems as if Rodrigo and Gabriela pick and strum faster than a hummingbird’s wing action. So given that tonight’s the last date on their world tour, their overworked digits must be pretty sore by now. Heedless, they tear through their set with an engaging gusto.

Personally, I prefer these guys in small doses. Something of the miracle of how they coax an extraordinary, polyphonic array of sound from two simple guitars tends to get lost after half an hour of driving rhythms. Every track’s got the same high energy – they cite Megadeth and Slayer as influences after all – but that perhaps removes some of the focus on musicianship that should give them the longevity they deserve.

Before I saw the band in concert, I would never have called the music of Lambchop romantic. Somehow, within a couple of tracks from their new release OH (Ohio), I found myself feeling the lurve. It could have been the semicute gaucheness of singer/guitarist Kurt Wagner, though he is rather an acquired taste. It could have been the rather bizarre album cover, on which is reproduced a painting by Wagner’s old professor depicting a couple of folks making whoopee.

It probably has more to do with the gentler pace of Lambchop’s odd little curio shop songs, the lyrics to which are usually about the simpler things in life. Like love, for example. Shaded by the peak of his trademark cap, Wagner puts a lot of effort into his performance yet in a charming sort of way, everything comes out softly.

The band’s rapport is familiar and well-rehearsed, though their number has been somewhat reduced over the last few years, arriving at an evidently natural balance. For much of the gig, they ambled through the new material and their audience was genial and patient: it always takes a few listens to get into a new Lambchop album anyway, so there weren’t really any big expectations.

Rounding off with a few comparatively rousing numbers from the back catalogue, I almost felt like I wanted to see Wagner and co stretch themselves a bit more, but it would be wrong to impose on them. People who love each other need to give each other room to grow.

Seun is the youngest son of the late Fela Kuti, the politically active leading light of Afrobeat. Having grown up in the thick of that scene, Seun now heads Africa 80, the second incarnation of his father’s band, playing the same energetic mix of funk, jazz, rock and highlife that electrified West African music in the 1970s.

Cheerfully arriving onstage after a characteristically long prelude, it becomes rapidly clear that the tall, young Kuti has every bit of his father’s innate cool. The band, taut and heavy on syncopated percussion, rattles along effortlessly and from the get go, no-one in the audience is left standing still. Kuti is comfortable as a frontman, swapping between voice and sax parts, contorting his body and throwing shapes during the solos of his colleagues.

The music ebbs and flows and there are no gaps between tracks. The rhythm of a hot, dry African evening descends upon the Ancienne Belgique, a special sense of time and place that can be felt, indistinct yet insistent, in the spirit of the rhythms and the brass punctuations.

Kuti’s socially aware lyrics, often delivered in mantra-like repetitions, remind us of the family legacy: to effect change through music. “Let me tell you something about the financial crisis,” admonishes Kuti during a brief interlude, as the band continues its incessant rhythm at half volume in the background, “the rich tell us that if we don’t save their banks, we’ll all be poor. Well, most of us have already been poor for a long time.”

All too quickly, it was over. Even if the pace was admirably hectic throughout, with its appetite piqued the crowd was still expecting more than a single, one-track encore. Indeed as the house lights went up, there was a palpable feeling that the climax of the night had still to be reached but the damp streets of Brussels were all that was left to us.

H, the son and nephew respectively of eccentric singers Jacques Higelin and Brigitte Fontaine, is something of a musical lacuna himself. Throughout the course of thirteen albums, the Frenchman has pinballed between jazz, rock, pop and disco and on L’Homme du Monde his latest effort he’s done all of them.

Looking like a cross between Joe Strummer and Lieutenant Columbo, H gangled onto the stage in a shiny gold jacket several sizes too small. He was the instantly recognisable comic book kid who dances at school discos with neither care nor co-ordination, looping through uncool and winding up cool. His rasping, chalky voice interrupted itself with a rabid, cartoon falsetto; his musical sense of humour often strayed into serious funk.

Despite occasional minor slips, H’s band was game enough to rise to the occasion. The bassist (as in double and guitar) and drummer were tight, keyboard and electric were inventive and effective. Though many in the crowd took time to “get” H, he managed to get two encores out of them.

And he was comfortable in his monologues, joking about Belgian liquidity, singing the Marseillaise and reentering the stage midway through the set in the superhero suit from his video for the shameless I Wanna Dance With Madonna. Arthur H clearly has the balls to experiment with pop, even if his costume shows them off a bit too much.

After an awkward warm-up from studenty noodlers Wixel, who might be the Flemish answer to Sigur Rós, the stage of Brussels’ Ancienne Belgique was quickly cleared and rearranged for the main event of the evening. Matthew Herbert, renowned for the idiosyncratic music he records under a schizophrenic array of monikers, led on his jazz band and calmly started to work his electronic equipment.

Herbert comes across live as something like a cross between Charlie Chaplin, John Cazale and Doctor Frankenstein. At times, he tricks his audience into thinking he has little control over the output of his machines, but this is pure modesty, given the extraordinary task he sets himself. For, as his band hops smoothly through jazz numbers led by quirky singer Eska, Herbert limits himself to sampling only what is played by them.

The contrast between buzzing, grating feedback and rich brass ought to have been more than a little painful, but the odds between these two unusual bedfellows were evened by Eska’s marvellous voice. Herbert’s past work with Björk is analogous.

So if some spectators seemed rather bemused at first by Herbert’s noisy and very occasionally jarring trickery, the obvious bonhomie among the players was endearing and the head of steam gathered by each track could have left no-one in any doubt that this had been a fascinating display of twenty-first century cabaret.