This Gift

iTunes Review

Morphing from a twangy punk sound on their first two albums (one of which gave us the wonderful “Johnny Cash” single), to a more distinct garage sound, This Gift finds the Scottish quartet rocking all-out, with barely a pause for breath. The band (two girls, two guys) confess to a love of “the swinging girl groups of pop’s golden age,” and many of the tracks here use retro girl-group vocal arrangements in ways that perfectly play off Scott Paterson’s and Adele Bethel’s clanging, screeching guitars and the adrenaline-pumping tempos. The swaggering “The Nest” boasts huge, echoing drums and strutting guitars, perfect for white go-go boot action, and “Darling” is what the Supremes would have sounded like were they a Scottish pop-punk band in 2008, instead of a female soul-pop vocal outfit in 1965. Both the title track and “Chains” return to a sort of Wild-West dust-up, with guitars sounding like whizzing bullets and vocals full of spaghetti-western echo and implied doom. But songs like “Flags,” “House In My Head,” and “Goodbye Service” serve to show how Sons and Daughters reach into the past, present, and the future, to bend and shape the pop format into something vibrant and new.