sam old stories

royal trux accelerator domino wigcd45 No other American group have so convincingly rendered in sound such a huge body of wisdom and truly eye-watering profundity culled straight from the thrift-bins, comic books, B-sides and cruddy movies of said continent's backyard than the mighty Royal Trux. Theirs is a simultaneous grasping of the ineffable appeal of mass-market teenage hangout rock'n'roll and the solitary tradition of the fiercely independent American wayward. The Trux make music that kicks butt but refuses to kiss it. A grand combination - indeed, the only option - for the future of teen entertainment.

1998's Accelerator was their seventh album and it's one of the most classically ragged and fire-breathing garage punk slabs of the late 1990s. The opening, I'm Ready, is a storming NY Dolls-styled howler with a chorus that combines SF Trips-era guitar ripple with the confrontational stomp of the Cleveland Tombs. Then there's the acid blast of Liar, sounding like a warm-up band for The 13th Floor Elevators on some balmy Texan evening with a hint of patented folk- rock vocal straining. Throw in some forlorn hillbilly pining about The Kid and the dribbling Juicy Juicy Juice (which sounds like the ultimate Stoner's TV commercial) and you've got a virtual concept album on the American teen scene 1958-1998. All beautifully executed with the Trux's trademark lack of finesse and timing. Like they sing on the album's closing track Stevie: "People think the United States is a sweet bunch of plastic flowers / But you think something else and I'm with you." You should be, too.

the dictators go girl crazy sony 33348cd Cars! Girls! Surfing! Beer! Nothing else matters here! The rallying cry of The Dictators is still one of the most genuinely soul-stirring and purest manifestations of the unreconstructed rock'n'roll whatsit. In the dead, teen-less zone of the early 1970s, The Dictators shone like a pre-punk pluke, marrying trad rock'n'roll concerns such as teen romance and surfing with a diet of couch-potato beer guzzling and bad TV. Their debut platter, 1974s Go Girl Crazy saw disaffected rock journalist Adny Shernoff put together a killer, lobotomised line-up. Ross The Boss on lead, Adny on Bass, Top Ten on guitar and professional wrestler Handsome Dick Manitoba on vocals. Too metal to cash in on punk, too stoopid (or too clever?) to go down with the metallers, they later shed members to the more straightforward likes of Twisted Sister and Manowar and all but called it a day. Still, one blast of Go Girl Crazy is enough to transport you to another time, a time when rock culture genuinely seemed to matter and spoke in tongues untranslatable by the adult world. Long the missing link between The Stooges and the New York punk scene, Go Girl Crazy still sounds refreshingly mindless.

visual art total object complete with missing parts you could be forgiven for failing to spot the theme of the latest exhibition at Tramway. Total Object Complete With Missing Parts brings together works by 12 artists based on ideas from the work of Samuel Beckett - famous for his plays and fiction; less so for his art criticism.

The most obvious link with Beckett is absurdism. The two dungaree- clad painters working their way along Nedko Solakov's wall, A Life (Black and White) - one continually painting it black while the other repaints it white - do give you the feeling you're waiting for Godot (as well as watching paint dry).

But the common thread in most of the works is storytelling and the interrupted narrative. Glasgow-based Simon Starling's Ladder (Aluminium) 5.4m is a scaffolded crow's nest on which you can just see welding gear. From it dangles a rope ladder, and underneath sits a pool of molten metal - you know something good has happened here, but you're not sure what.

Angela Bulloch's fascinating pixel boxes also tell a story without giving away the plot - she took three 30-second scenes from high- concept sci-fi movie The Matrix, isolated the action from a corner of the screen and magnified it. The result is three towers of large, flashing light-boxes, each representing just a few pixels, reducing the narrative to utter abstraction.

Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn tells another kind of story, one without an end. La Cuisine Et La Guerre is a patchwork of references to the dysfunctional relations between the people of Latin America, their historical European conquerors, and their present-day political leaders. But the narrative does not stop there - the work is accompanied by the envelopes and documentation which track the material's own progress between the continents.

And with reference to the interrupted narrative, what could be more fitting than Fiona Banner's Full Stops? These monolithic black sculptures literally punctuate the entire gallery space, threatening to trip you up while you gaze at Starling's crow's nest.

Most of these pieces tell part of a story - whether the beginning, middle or end - but some don't seem to fit at all. Mariele Neudecker's sculptural realisation of light streaming through church windows is beautiful and intricately made, but it seems to have more in common with the ecstasies of the Renaissance altar-piece than the agonies of existentialism. Equally, Digital Forest, made specially for this space by celebrated Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas (who has never before exhibited in Scotland) seems somehow too still and self-contained to play a part in any narrative. Resembling architectural elevations, the painstakingly drawn forests and branches represent a synthetic landscape - "a new third space", constructed from something close to reality.

This exhibition is unlikely to shock or provoke anger (unless you get sick of hearing Susan Philipsz's Ziggy Stardust from all sides). You'll walk away feeling like you've channel-hopped ten different stories, and will spend the rest of the day imagining the missing parts.

Catriona Black

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