When the best thing you can say about a band’s comeback album is that it sounds vaguely like their era-defining punk funk debut, you can either wonder why they bothered or admire their dogged devotion to a single sound. The music world has moved on from the dance rock sound popularised by the Glasgow foursome’s foot-stomping first single "Take Me Out" (a title now more synonymous with TV dating hell), but Franz Ferdinand have not moved with it.

It's a lottery. There are writers who’d see something in the return, after five years away, of this multi-million-selling Scottish four-piece. These writers, however, didn’t step in so Travis have been thrown to the dogs, a non-starter for both of us. Sooooo… there’s a song here called “New Shoes” that I wouldn’t turn off on the radio, a loping, pleasant groove, and another jangly thing called “Boxes”… no, this isn’t working, that last one is just mawkish, reminds me of early Sting. No, no, no, not bloody Travis.

When Leonardo da Vinci went for a job in Milan, he wrote ahead mentioning his bridge-building skills and then turned up at court with a lyre he had made in the shape of a horse’s skull. But had he finished compiling his illustrated treatise on the human body - said Alastair Sooke in this Edinburgh Culture Show special - it would have been as a scientist, rather than as an artist, that he would have been remembered for centuries.

On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. In any case, this always fascinating if dramatically primitive early clash of sex and religion is shot through with later passages composed in between work on the Ring, most of them included in last night's 1875 hybrid version.

Watching Adam Stafford at work can only be described as magical. Thanks to his ingenious use of loop and effects pedals, the Falkirk-born songwriter can spin intricate, layered compositions using nothing but his voice and a couple of bars on guitar. At last week’s Glasgow launch show for his latest album, he ended the night with a ten-minute monster from Awnings, a 2009 experimental a capella album. Cue an audience literally stunned by a noise as wild and intense - and yet, as strangely controlled - as that from a full orchestra.

Scotland’s East Neuk is a little like Hardy’s Wessex – less a geographical specific and more an idea, a resonance. Tucked up into the crook of the Firth of Forth, directly below St Andrews, the region encompasses the tiny coastal towns of Crail, Pittenweem, Anstruther and St Monans, where stern stone cottages and still sterner churches have done battle with the elements since at least the 9^th century.

This is the directorial debut of Eve Best, better known as a talented classical and comedic actress, who was last at Shakespeare's Globe appearing as Beatrice in a superb Much Ado About Nothing opposite Charles Edwards's Benedick.

There is a burgeoning of Scottish films that refuse to romanticise the Highlands and islands. Writer-director Scott Graham’s feature debut Shell does not satirize the capitalistic exploitation of the nation's heritage culture as do several of the movies directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. However, the braes and mountains surrounding Shell's single location, a remote petrol station by a loch, have a bleaker and more implacable presence than is usual in Scottish cinema.

That KT Tunstall has released probably her most introspective album to date is unsurprising, given that the past year has seen both the end of her marriage and the death of her father. But the trouble with introspective albums is that, without a certain rawness, they’re not always the most engaging listen. Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon contains some of the most beautiful music of the St Andrews songwriter’s career but, like when people tell you their dreams, it isn’t always very interesting.

Boards of Canada have it nailed. If we are to believe what we’re told, Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin are semi-permanently holed up in rustic heathlands south-west of Edinburgh, beavering with mystical intensity at analogue electronica. Every few years they release an enigmatic slice of it that’s pure, classic Warp Records on… Warp Records.