the HOT 100
MATCH MAKERS 4 SACRED PAWS
The worst thing about Sacred Paws’ win in the Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award was that everyone’s ‘other’ favourite, Ela Orleans, came away empty handed. Yet Strike a Match – the debut album by Londoner Rachel Aggs and Glaswegian Eilidh Rodgers, released at the beginning of the year on Mogwai’s Rock Action label – was an incredibly deserving winner, an itchy-footed, summery fusion of African-inl uenced playing styles and Glaswegian indie-pop nous. Like Orleans, they feel integrally, dei nitively redolent of urban Scotland in 2017, precisely because their worldliness is on sonic display at all times. (DP)
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RACHEL MACLEAN FACE VALUE
Chosen to represent Scotland at the 57th International Venice Biennale with Spite Your Face: A Dark Venetian Fairytale, Maclean created a garish but beautifully realised i lm – starring herself in every role, as always – which drew in the story of Pinocchio, the rise of fake news and the city of Venice itself. It will be seen at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery from early 2018, although sadly only Venice audiences had the chance to compare Maclean’s low-budget humour and ingenuity with Damien Hirst’s similarly themed monument to the witless and excessively overblown. (DP) 40 THE LIST 1 Nov 2017–31 Jan 2018