Sons and Daughters’ seven-track EP Love The Cup, released November 2003, introduced us to their somewhat unenviable lyrical world of relationships that don’t function and yet compel the two sides to go on warring and loving in their own twisted fashion. The music, no less compelling, scratches and screeches around them, recalling the Velvet Underground in its eerie minimalism and Smog in its bluesy urgency.

Now they’ve returned with their first full-length record, The Repulsion Box, a similarly enthralling set of ten songs that further explore their queasy addiction to murder ballad lyrics and celebrate the vital, unpolished sound of a band who can nail a track in a single take.

Sons and Daughters’ four members met and formed in Glasgow, where, says singer/guitarist Scott Paterson, “if you love music you’ll meet everyone else in the city who’s into it.” Not wanting to resort to placing anonymous small ads to recruit members to her putative band, Scott’s co-singer and songwriter Adele Bethel asked him to join after she, bass and mandolin player Ailidh Lennon and drummer David Gow saw him play a solo live set.

They sought and won money from the Scottish Arts Council to record Love The Cup after playing several high-profile support shows in Glasgow and developing an itch, in Adele’s words “to make something, a product of our own.” Given that their short sharp shocks of songs weren’t quite the ticket in a city where droning post-rock was still in favour, it took an American, Ben Goldberg of Ba Da Bing! records, to see the band’s potential and take a chance on releasing it as an album.

Meanwhile, down in London, Domino founder Laurence Bell – ever a man of impeccable taste – had shown interest in the band and kept a close eye on them while they toured the US and played a blinding showcase at March 2004’s South By Southwest conference. “That’s when it all started happening for us,” says Scott, recalling how Bell quickly got on the case and eventually signed them to Domino, finally enabling British fans to buy Love The Cup without having to pay through the nose for an American import.

Tons of touring followed, with high-profile fans Franz Ferdinand and Clinic among others, as did growing acclaim that portrayed the band as “a Buckfast-drenched Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood”. Their live shows continued to amaze with their sheer abandon. “We try to make every show sound and feel like it means something,” says David.

“Yeah, it’s hard to be ferocious every night,” adds Scott, but hard as it is to achieve, ferocity is what they successfully convey, both night after night on stage and on record. This they attribute to the power of hearing their favourite records, among them Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man,” which they heard one night at approaching-legendary Glasgow club Optimo.

“That’s what hearing those kind of records makes us want to do,” says David. “You can visualize the whole band in the studio sitting down and just improvising. A friend of mine saw her in Dublin: she did the whole show in a rage from start to finish, yelling at anyone who asked her to play ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ and saying she’d walk off if they did it again.” The essence of Simone’s undimmed anger became one of the inspirations for the songs on The Repulsion Box.

The band trooped off to Cologne’s Conny-Plank-Studio, another cult music institution, where Brian Eno recorded Before And After Science, Kraftwerk made Autobahn and, recalls Scott with some relish, Ultravox recorded Vienna. “We even used the same piano as they did.” The residential set-up meant that all the band’s day-to-day needs were taken care of by the late Konrad Plank’s wife Krista, leaving them, together with producer Victor Van Vugt, to concentrate on divining the legendary studio’s source of inspiration.

“It was just an incredible experience. You could really feel something in the air there,” says Ailidh with awe.

“All the characters in the different songs link up,” Scott explains. “It’s not a concept album but it does tell a story throughout.” “Choked” – spirally, intense, with a sense of just-reined-in hysteria breaking through in the chorus – tells another side of that story, while the deceptively upbeat-sounding “Red Receiver,” written in their prolific fortnight’s stay at Conny Plank, is the elliptical tale of an ill-fated union.

Scott and Adele don’t even seem sure themselves where their love of twisted tales comes from, but one thing of which they are certain is how they want their music to sound. “Too many bands spend three months in the studio, getting bored and taking two days over a bass sound,” complains Adele. Sons and Daughters do the opposite: “We just get in there, plug in, mess around for an hour then record it there and then.”

The result is an album that sounds thoroughly alive, despite its themes of death and repulsion. As Scott says of his favourite track on the album, the zippy, mandolin-driven Medicine, “It’s like a constant heartbeat.”