Coffee-Table Notes

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, Monday May 23rd 2011 The Nightingales are what happens to 1970s-sired latch-key kids if you leave them alone with a CD of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, a DVD of The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club and the Bumper Book of Existentialism For Boys. After more than thirty years in the saddle, with only occasional sojourns into solo careers and Svengali-ing long-lost girl band We've Got A Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It for distraction, one-time John Peel stalwarts live experience is an intense and relentless chug of skewed meat n' two veg avant-garage-punk laced with vocalist and wordsmith Robert Lloyd's very English absurdist world-view of how (post) modern life is rubbish. Think Pere Ubu if they'd grown up in the shadows of Birmingham's Bull Ring rather than the Flats in Cleveland. Since reforming in 2004, The Nightingales have pretty much picked up where they left off, with three albums and another pe

When David Shrigley spoke in 2010 about how the arts institutions in Glasgow were crucial to his creative development, he may have been bemoaning the impending threat of arts cuts, but it nevertheless spoke volumes about where art education really happens. As this year's art school graduates prepare to display their wares in degree shows at Glasgow School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art, perhaps its worth taking stock of how the schools help young artists to find their voice. Especially in a climate where two graduates of GSA's Masters of Fine Art Course, Karla Black and Martin Boyce, have just been shortlisted for the 2011 Turner Prize. This on top of their presence representing Scotland in the Venice Biennale, Boyce in 2010, with Black picking up the mantle this year. This too given that previous Turner winners such as Douglas Gordon (1996), Simon Starling (2005) and Richard Wright (2009), and nominees including Jim Lambie (2005), Nathan Coley (2007) and Lu

Exposure Tenniscoats Who are Tenniscoats? They're a charming Japanese duo made up of real life couple Saya and Ueno Takashi, who over the last decade have released eight albums albums of their prolific songsmithery as well as playing with fellow travellers Maher Shalal Hash Baz and others in the fecund Japanese alt-pop scene. And what do they sound like? Think stripped-down indie-folk whimsy, gently lilting female vocals and a set of organically generated miniatures that may be fragile in construction, but which never fail to captivate. Music to swoon to, basically. But quietly. And what's the Scottish connection? Well, the Takashis have been regular visitors here ever since they bumped into Glasgow's uber-DIY veterans and long-time supporters of Japanese pop The Pastels, later playing with them at the much missed Triptych festival and collaborating on the 'Two Sunsets' album in 2009. Prior to this, they took part in a Scottish Arts Council

3 stars Now how DIY is this? An 8-track cassette of breakneck spindly indie guitar fuzz by Glasgow girl/boy trio featuring former Park Attack drummer turned singer/guitarist Lorna Gilfedder that has no name and no label and is available in a gloriously limited edition of fifty-seven. Soundwise, the Grrrls lo-fi vignettes lean towards the C-86 song-book, all dolefully trilled harmony vocals counterpointed by FX pedal murk and biscuit-tin beats suggesting a darker side beyond songs about Paul Simon. This may be a wilfully back to basics stance, but 'New Pop' might just predict the future. Did somebody say sha-la-la? The List, May 2011 ends

4 stars Hallelujah! The ghost of Uncle John & Whitelock, Glasgow's seriously demented purveyors of their self-styled horror r n' b, is reborn and delivered here in the still possessed shape of Jabob Yates (nee Lovatt), former howler of that parish. Lovatt and co may brand their primitive psycho-billy musings as 'Doom-Wop' these days, but this twitch-hipped, finger-poppin' but downright dark debut sounds more of a continuum, all back-alley hellfire preaching, growling fuzz guitar and wonky stumblebum piano with a parade of cartoon monsters tripping by the junkyard where the bad-boys hang out. Praise be and Amen for such a glorious resurrection. The Herald, May 2011 ends

Named after a suitably scuzzed-up epistle by Nick Cave's former breeding ground/alma mater The Birthday Party, but judging by the sleeve image too young to shave, this Glasgow quintet take their forbears primitive voodoo trash aesthetic twang by the scruff of its studded dog-collar and let rip like The Stooges giving the Jesus and Mary Chain what for. No luddites these elegantly wasted kids, mind, because, while things get more urgent as things progress, the climax of the mighty 'Miriam Hollow' has shades of the Simple Minds 'I Travel', plus there's an entire bonus CD of remixes designed to scare yourself in the dark with. The List, May 2011 ends

“Let's get this over with,” says David Harrower at the start of our conversation about Knives in Hens, his still remarkable 1995 debut play, which receives a major revival from the National Theatre of Scotland next month. You can and can't see why Harrower is so reluctant to talk about one of the most brilliantly strange of plays to have comer out of anywhere in recent times. It's sixteen years since Harrower's starkly brutal tale of one woman's emancipation in a pre-industrial era first captivated audiences in the Traverse Theatre's smaller space in Edinburgh, and a lot longer, one suspects, since Harrower first started writing it. What was part thriller, part love triangle, and told in a minimalist, mono-syllabic demotic, slowly but surely announced Harrower's arrival as a major writer on an international scale. Knives in Hens also went some way to define an ongoing exploration of intimacy that has manifested itself in various forms through