Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The face that fits is everything in Marius von Mayenburg's satire on the beauty myth, brought to madcap life in Debbie Hannan's production of Maja Zade's pithy English language translation. Martin McCormick is Lette, a hot-shot inventor planning on punting his latest gizmo to a highly- charged sales conference. His superior, Scheffler, has other ideas, alas, and co-opts Lette's pretty boy assistant Karlmann to do the job on the grounds that Lette is simply too ugly to get a result. Even Lette's wife Fanny is forced to agree, and drastic action is required. When the bandages are peeled back after extreme plastic surgery, Lette's life changes overnight, and suddenly he is the golden boy. Until, that is, everyone wants a piece of him to the extent that the surgeon who changed Lette’s face finds a whole new market in copycat identikit physiognomy that makes across the board gorgeousness the new normal. Such is the way of s

The Sun is shining down on the Meadows as Joseph Malik talks about his new record. It’s the perfect weather for the 12” EP released by ever-expanding Edinburgh collective, Out of the Ordinary, and which also happens to be called Meadows. It’s one of the hottest days of the year, and the birds are singing in Malik’s back garden. You can hear them too at the start of Meadows, just before the guitar pattern from Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow era song, Today – played live rather than sampled, with the band’s blessing - eases in the woozily transcendent song launched at a very special gig on home turf next weekend. Meadows features the twin vocals of former Coco and the Bean chanteuse Rosanne Erskine and Davy Henderson of Fire Engines and The Sexual Objects. Malik may be taking a back seat, but the song’s melting pot of low-slung psychedelic soul, euphoric strings and gospel chorus couldn’t have happened without him. “It’s an anthem of well-being,” says Malik, who wrote

There’s something familiar about Edinburgh Leisure, the duo formed by visual artist Keith Farquhar and Tim Fraser, whose debut album, Die Gefahr Im Jazz, was recently released by Tenement Records. It’s not just their civic-minded name, which conjures up images of public swimming pools and soon to be demolished leisure centres. Neither is it the band’s logo, which appropriates that of a well-known high street bank. Rather, it’s more to do with the record itself, which showcases a laconic series of skewed thumbnail sketches of modern life in all its first world problem rubbishness, from broken iPhones to being trapped in Ikea. Scorpio Leisure makes a fleeting but troublingly insistent musical reference to The Police’s song, Roxanne, with Get a Good Job doing something similar with Dark Side of the Moon era Pink Floyd’s own cash cow, Money. “These little kitschy type appropriations break the ice a little bit,” says Farquhar. “There’s a lot of appropriation in my art, and Tim was