I think it began with Fleetwood Mac. Something about the joined voices of a male and a female that is simply the two voices singing together in harmony. This is opposed to a duet, which I don't care for, because it's typically the two voices taking turns rather than singing together. But there's something more to it, too. Most duets are artificial, created in the imaginations of the marketing department rather than the sweat of constant touring and clubbing. To give examples, what I like is the sound of Fleetwood Mac or X or The Reivers (to establish my Austin, TX cred there) as opposed to Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand or Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross. As soon as I publish this, I'm sure someone will come up with a duet pair that I do like, but there's always an exception.

I first saw and heard Sons and Daughters on a music video that came with my Paste Magazine. From the first notes of "Johnny Cash," my ears perked up. This was something different. A simple repeating guitar part and a four piece band equally men and women. Then the man began singing in this deep voice, somewhat even resident of the man referenced in the title. And then she came in, like Exene Cervenka joining John Doe at the mic, a blast of raw female shrieking harmony that just unglued me. The video matched the rawness of the music, as a simple concert in front of a rough crowd of 30 or so deginerated into a bar fight as filmed by the Wachowski brothers in stop-motion time. In the video, the instruments start smoking and if there was a better metaphor for their sound, I can't think of it. This was punk music for the new millenium, and I had just found the band that had inherited the mantle of X, my favorite band from the late 80s (just as Fleetwood Mac had been my favorite band before them). The two lead vocalists are Scott Paterson and Adele Bethel, with their fellow bandmembers David Gow (whoops) and Ailidh Lennon (hollers). Oh, and if you couldn't tell, they're from Scotland.

I couldn't find a copy of "Johnny Cash" on CD immediately, but as soon as I found it, I picked up their first album, The Repulsion Box (on which I will comment some day). But in my mind, I always associated Sons and Daughters with that early video and I was determined to find the debut EP that it was drawn from. That EP is Love the Cup.

Not every song on Love the Cup is like "Johnny Cash," but every song is exactly the thing I was looking for in a rock song. "Fight" is probably the closest (unsurprising, given the video interpreation of the earlier song), but it adds in a call and response between the two leads for the chorus that makes it different enough to stand out. Most of the other songs are a little slower ("Blood," "Broken Bones"--hmm, sense a trend in the song names?), but all of them have a similar drive--a steady 4/4 drum beat from David Gow that just impels the songs on.

I can't tell you anything about what the lyrics mean, because these are songs that I feel more than I actively engage my intellect with. Part of that is that Adele and Scott sing with accents, which make deciphering the lyrics a little more difficult, but for the most part, it's because I'm too busy drowning in the sound that they make.

The final song on this EP is entitled "Awkward Duet," and maybe that's the difference between the sound that I like and the type I don't. The emphasis in this EP on their live sound echoes the cyclical movement in rock music between the extremely produced and sincere amateurishness. Sons and Daughters have found the perfect ratio between these two for me, and I anxiously await a new album as well as a return to the U.S. for a tour (this year, they've only been to New York).