BOSSA NOVA REINVENTlONS NOUVELLE VAGUE ABC, Glasgow, Fri 25 May
There's something about covers bands that usually screams ‘novelty record'. However. Nouvelle Vague managed to transcend the Mike Flowers Poi)s compariSOns with their eponymous debut album, and multi- instrumentalists Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux pulled it off again with 2006's Bande A Part. Cover versions their best numbers might be. but they're wide-eyed. exciting cover versions that make you start listening to the words in completely different ways. Their secret ingredient is a coterie of breathy-voiced French girl vocalists (Melanie Pain. Phoebe Kildeer and Marina Celeste have all contributed to the most recent album. though the final line-up for the Glasgow gig is currently unknown). all a bit crazy and all with their tongues firmly planted in their rouged. sculpted cheeks.
On record. they take overplayed New Wave standards. inject Wit and glamour. and often manage to imbue more joy and depth than the original. Their reinvention of the Dead Kennedys' dreary old misogynist rant ‘Too Drunk to Fuck‘ as a gleeful. girl- leery hymn in praise of 5am nihilism is a revelation. Live. the tunes are transformed again. the audience gatecrashing a liquored-up jazz club. maybe. or an after-hours party in a Bra/illian bossa nova bar. The double bass comes out to play. the singers bat false eyelashes and shimmy drunkenly in fringed cocktail dresses.
Catch them now — they're already playing the largest stage in the ABC. and with ‘Too Drunk to Fuck' about to get the Tarantino treatment on the Grindhouse soundtrack. they could potentially get too big for the intimacy that makes it all work. (Kirstin Innesl
56 THE LIST 2/1 May- /' Jun 2007
HIP HOP
DIZZEE RASCAL Arches, Glasgow, Thu 31 May; Liquid Room, Edinburgh,
Fri 1 Jun
For many the turn of the new millennium was a bleak time for British music. A mixture of saccharine garage, imported nu metal and Travis had ripped the spine from the charts, leaving a charmless corpse and no respite in sight. Few though could have predicted the arrival of a then 16 year-old MC from East London going by the name of Dizzee RascaL
Here was a British rapper, a concept once almost an oxymoron, that appealed not only to pirate radio audiences but also the chin stroking and canapé munching Mercury Music Prize committee, topping it off by selling over 100,000 albums. As scare stories of ‘hoodies’ and ASBOs clung to the news agenda the claustrophobic Boy in Da Corner, with its tales of teen pregnancies and street violence, stood as the first portrait of a Blair-era inner city youth that had previously been voiceless.
It seems almost fitting then that the release of his third album, Maths and English, should coincide with the Prime Minister leaving office. Sill retaining the experimental production and aggression of its predecessors, signs of his long professed admiration for Nirvana have emerged with the riffage of single ‘Sirens’ and a collaboration with Artic Monkeys. Rascal’s live performances have similarly matured from his pirate radio days, combining the rabid aggression of a grime rave with the panache of a man who has already toured the world at the age of 22. With British music’s most exciting prospect coming of age, the results should not be missed. (Miles Johnson)
EXPERIMENTAL LE WEEKEND Tolbooth, Stirling, Fri 25—Sun 27 May
Experimental music festivals are currently so voluminOLis as to arguably be considered more over-ground than under. When Le Weekend first set the trend back in 1998. however. the landscape was a very different place to the one its tenth anniversary three-day wigout now occupies.
The preViOusly strict demarcation between free jazz. electronica and a then fledgling noise scene has this year given way to an a.inytliiiig-goes approach. So. just as Falkirk pianist Bill Wells introduces Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake to a collaboration with trombonist Annie Whitehead. To Rococo Rot's Stefan Schneider and electronicist Barbara Morgenstern, Phantom Orchard unites harpist Zeena Parkins with lkue Mori. once drummer With New York No Wave pioneers. DNA.
Beyond such an inclusive roster are three espeCIally exciting Le Weekend commissions. The One Ensemble Orchestra's debut live show finds Volcano The Bear's Daniel Padden fleshing out his low-key iinproVIsations with clarinets. cellos and Viola. and Nagisa Ni te's UK debut marks the overdue arrival of Japan's veteran masters of psych-folk.
Finally. if in need of a lie-down. Kafle Matthews Sonic Bed,_Scotland project is an installation and concert that Matthews take a mighty leap away from her recent Scottish
Symphony Orchestra collaboration to team up With pipers Jarlath Henderson and Chris Gibb.
Events kick off at the neighbouring Changing Room gallery. where Glasgow's Nalle play a Friday tea-time set of pastoral- inclined Scando-East European folklorica.
'lt's all gone quite DlY.‘ says Campbell. 'lt's about putting things together that don't logically fit. but somehow work.‘ (Neil Cooper)