Music

 We’re now used to bands who specialise in hilariously inappropriate covers, be it Hayseed Dixie’s bluegrass versions of heavy metal, or Señor Coconut’s mambo readings of Kraftwerk, or Dread Zeppelin’s rasta take on Led Zep. And it’s tempting to file the Puppini Sisters alongside them. Marcella Puppini, Kate Mullins and Stephanie O’Brien are three singers from the Trinity College Of Music in Greenwich who thought it’d be a laugh to update the Andrews Sisters. They do immaculate three-part vocal arrangements of ’40s swing standards (‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’, ‘Mr Sandman’) with accompaniment from a jaunty gypsy jazz trio.

Crucially, they’ve broken out of the jazz and cabaret ghetto by applying the same contrapuntal harmonies and chromatic keyshifts to a curveball list of pop songs (Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, The Smiths’ ‘Panic’, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’). A key influence are the three cartoon grannies from the animated film ‘Belleville Rendez-vous’ (they even got the film’s music director Benoît Charest to produce this album) and sometimes you wish that the Puppinis’ filigree ’40s pastiches were subverted by the strange and spooky junkyard gamelan backings that Charest used on his soundtrack. If they do that then they could really be on to something…