Comfortable though laurels probably are, no half-decent band should be content to rest on theirs. Despite the fact that diverging from a successful path involves the risk of alienating fans seemingly ever ready to throw up their hands and wail, ‘it’s not the same; we hate it!’, it’s the duty of every band to literally make a difference. The younger artists are, the less likely they will be to mentally hit ‘repeat’, but still, the temptation must be huge.
Respect, then, to Sons And Daughters for the subtle but strikingly effective exercise in shape-shifting that is their second album. For their 2005 debut LP, ‘The Repulsion Box’, the savvy Glaswegian four-piece hired Victor Van Vugt, whose production skills were a great match for their darkly dramatic and thrillingly insistent post-punk with a country-noir overlay. For ‘This Gift’, Bernard Butler is at the controls.
Now, the former floppy-fringed Suede guitarist might not seem like an obvious choice but he’s done SAD a power of good, vastly expanding their dynamic range and pushing them in directions they’d likely never have gone by themselves. Namely, into poppy punk and new wave. No need to panic, this is still identifiably SAD: it’s just that now skirling urgency isn’t their only tempo. Guitarist Scott Paterson has admitted that it was ‘an incredibly difficult record’ to make, but credits a whip-cracking Butler for the band’s new fascia, which reveals them as the fans of The Smiths, Blondie, the Ronettes, Lena Lovich and The Stooges they always were. Even Sheena Easton gets a nod on ‘Chains’. Sons And Daughters have always brimmed with a darkly sensual promise; that they’ve realised this in their poppiest work to date is a mark of their creative verve.
