| Depending on which direction
you look tonight you’re either ordering another pint of whatever’s on offer in
a tatty Glasgow Students’ Union bar as the jukebox randomly chooses yet another
track from a Teenage Fanclub album that’s never been removed and probably never
will be, or damnit, you’re going to the ball and you don’t care who knows it.
The male siblings, then, came as they were, as they would do – lumberjack shirts,
indie-club zip-ups, shaggy hair. The girls, contrarily, are out to make you feel
guilty and underdressed – elegant scarlet evening attire and icy demeanor. Sons
& Daughters aren’t exactly a peg-in-hole band anyway, but in the flesh, under
the bright lights, these visual juxtapositions underpin their audible counterparts
even more.
So they essentially have one trick – they play boisterous
inflected folk music, loudly, like they’re brawling in the street with a boney
busker (bearded too, possibly, though they sport none themselves, they’re too
contemporary for that, and 50% female). But that’s not exactly where it stops,
probably by chance more than design they’re a literal microcosm of much that’s
thrilling in music right now – so frankly, fuck the fact that there’s little leeway
in their outlook.
There’s the gender-jousting, enduring DIY impression
that the Fiery Furnaces gave early on, yet in the shape of a genuine capability
rather than merely an ethic. There’s base-element country/garage hybrid excitement
(copyright Jack White) wound up into a tight ball – guitarist/singer Scott Paterson
plays intensely, and with an expression of ingrained desperation like he’s pleading
with a 500 strong jury and the gallows are but a missed chord away.
Then
there’s Adele Bethel, sleek like Roisin Murphy, shrieks like Karen O, looks like
a character on a Cluedo card (it was her, in the dressing room, with the fishnets
and whiskey bottle!). It’s a splendidly unexpected twist on the character we already
knew from recorded evidence. The play between the two sides may be disappointingly
muted, but their differences achieve definitive results.
The songs all
follow the same premise, and those previously unheard square up uniformly with
the excellent ‘Love The Cup’ mini-album. But they have a couple of gears to hand
which they use effectively, unleashing occasional devastation out the relative
comfort of the humdrum at well chosen intervals. Thus the beautifully mandolin-adorned
‘Fight’ stirs eventually into a brilliant cacophony, ‘Johnny Cash’ flipside ‘Hurt’
utilizes the quiet/loud format to its own frantic ends and the main attraction
itself flowers noisily with great verve. And there’s turbulence even when they
bring things down a little for the staccato ‘Broken Bones’.
It’s probable
that nobody’s really expecting longevity, they’ve almost got too good an idea
here to waste it away like that. It is likely though that when the time comes
they’ll be remembered as one of indie’s most thrillingly electric sideshows. Relevant
sites:
http://thevessyl.org/badabing/sondaughters.html
James Berry for Crud Magazine 2004©
October - December 2004- News Archive | |
|
