Coffee-Table Notes

Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh 4 stars There's something that feels scarily like you've gate-crashed an episode of hedonistic teen drama Skins at this fourteens and over show, such is the sing-along fervour that Joseph Mount's squeaky-clean electro-pop dervishes are greeted with. It's easy to see why, especially after the too eager to please but increasingly powerful estuarised indie hip hop of support act Ghostpoet, whose current BBC 6Music favourite Survive It is shaping up to be an anthem for the twenty-first century dole queue kids. Metronomy themselves are appealingly geeky and unerringly polite in their demeanour, even as they serve up a jaunty brand of left-field suburban pop as demonstrated on their recent third album, The English Riviera. It's an angular sound that continues a line from XTC through to Field Music, but which live becomes a musclebound punk-funk maelstrom powered by Gbenga Adelekan's slap bass guitar and Anna Prior's cri

Karla Black likes making a mess. Granted her large-scale sculptures are an organised mess straight out of some pre-school activity club exercise in making do with every smelly material to hand, but a glorious mess nevertheless. It's this constant child-like striving to make order out of chaos by way of a primal imagination bursting forth into the world that finds Black not just a highlight of this year's British Art Show, which tours to Glasgow this month following a stint at the Hayward in London, but also, as curated by Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, the Scottish representative in the forthcoming Venice Bienalle. West Dumbartonshire-born Black may already be internationally renowned for work that at various points has included lipstick, nail varnish, body cream and fizzed-up Alka Seltza left out in the rain as its raw materials, but both gigs remain pretty high profile stuff. For the British Art Show – subtitled 'In the Days of the Comet,' Black h

The Banshee Labrynth, Edinburgh Monday April 18th 4 stars Two couples stand side by side in a projected snapshot at the back of the stage. The fashions are retro, the pose casually studied somewhere between a 1970s terrorist cell and the anti-Abba. In the flesh, a blonde woman is slumped on all fours on the floor, babbling profane gibberish in free-associative tongues into a microphone. Her partner behind her, a dark-haired man, manipulates an old-fashioned cassette recorder. Further back, a dark-haired woman stands behind a vintage Korg synth unleashing shards of white noise into the ether. The small man next to her scrapes out minimal abstractions from his electric guitar, gradually steering things into full-on metal. These two noise duos playing together in a German/Italian avant provocateur supergroup alliance are closer to live art in their sonic extrapolations. Together they conjure up the ghosts of Throbbing Gristle by way of Popol Vuh and Diamanda Galas all the

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh Thursday April 14th 4 stars Edinburgh eccentrica in exelcis is the order of the day for this triple bill based around the unveiling of Paul Vickers and The Leg's forthcoming third album of wacked-out Beefhearian music-hall blart. Opening proceedings, however, is Zed Penguin, aka Aussie ex-pat Matthew Winter, whose vintage amp appears to have a heartbeat, and who ushers himself in with an elaborate backing track intro before launching into a set of heavily-echoed thrash-blues that errs towards the left-field in a twangingly captivating fashion. Even more of a show-man is Sara and the Snakes guitarist and best dressed man about town Andy Brown, who in his Victorian Karaoke guise plays to backing tapes, effectively duetting with himself in a voice somewhere between a whisper and a growl. Brown changes hats, gives a singalong rendition of tiny tots nursery rhyme 'This Little Piggy,' and does warped disco segues into George McCrae

Change is in the air in Pitlochry this year. Not at first glance, it has to be said, as to the naked eye the town this time of year remains the most tasteful tourist trap for miles, salmon ladder and all. Look beyond the politesse of afternoon teas and ice-cream in the sun, however, and you'll see the most impeccably turned out theatre in the country warming up for its sixtieth anniversary season of six plays with some very familiar themes on show. As what has effectively been the stylistic equivalent of a west end producing theatre set against a picture postcard backdrop of rolling Perthshire hills, Pitlochry Festival Theatre understands tradition more than most, but as artistic director John Durnin explains, this year's selection of classic works have been very carefully chosen. “It was quite a challenge to think about how we put the 2011 programme together,” he says on a rare break from the rehearsal room, where three productions are already on the go, with

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There's something ineffably clever about Pants on Fire's audacious reimagining of Roman poet Ovid's post-BC best-seller. It's not just its re-jigged setting to World War Two England, where soldiers of land, sea and air rub up against posh-frocked gels who talk in cut-glass, quite too utterly pukkah tones. It's the way this devised show, written and directed by Peter Bramley alongside a seven-strong ensemble of actor-musicians, manage to wend their merry way through a well-drilled whirlwind of utilitarian parlour-room show-and-tell with hints of Weimar cabaret to serve up a breathless reinvention of ancient myths. This comes by way of a series of doomed golly-gosh yarns of love, death and derring-do that attempt to pluck some order from the all-encroaching chaos. So Jupiter is a randy old toff whose long-suffering spouse Juno works a magic of her own, Cupid is a mischievous, catapult-wielding evacuee, Semele a pool-lovin

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars Recession-divined poverty destroys lives. Yet the survivor of post-Communist Russia's 1990s economic meltdown in Hattie Naylor's devastating solo play - a co-production between ATC and Soho Theatre - suggests there can be the strangest of liberations too. Based on a true story, Naylor's hour-long monologue tells the harrowing yet appositely heart-warming tale of one psychologically and emotionally damaged little boy's Dickensian flight from domestic abuse onto the cold Moscow streets with only two packets of crisps and a photograph of his mother for comfort. Before he can be one more statistic, Ivan is taken under the wing of a white dog and her brood of fellow strays. This pack he runs with become his new family, developing an unspoken trust as they run the gauntlet of gangsters, police and more hardened street urchin addicts, who only confirm to Ivan that all humans are bad. As related by actor Rad Kaim from the in