It’s during the closing track, ‘Gone’, when Adele Bethel gathers a tonne of acidic spittle in the back of her throat, flings back her head and lets rip with awesome vitriol and true Glaswegian subtlety – “I cut you oot of every photograph, within an inch of yer loiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife!”. That’s when you nod sagely, agree, and begin to brew some poison in the back of your throat too. Because that is exactly the sort of fever that the previous 10 tracks have pumped you stock-full of. It is a headstrong, frantic, dancing-on-hot-coals dismemberment of folk music, as a sideshow attraction to the queue for the gates of hell. It really gets a fire going in your belly. They are brothers and sisters as much as Jack & Meg White are heirs to the throne, but this collection is so tightly bound, yet at glorious loggerheads within itself, that their name makes sense.
This is blunt too. There’s no messing. It has this gleeful sense of exploration, running headfirst into everything with eyes fearlessly wide open. And you’re not exactly invited in – there is a rock-hard defensive front line – but you are sure expected to pay attention. Which you will. The album, like the mini-album before it ‘Love The Cup’, is made captivating by the rebounding energies of Scott Paterson’s searing, paranoid, apocalyptic country riffs and Adele’s barbaric, tainted, cut-glass, it’s-2am-and-I’m-screaching-up-your-drainpipe-with-a-fuckin’-point-to-prove-buster vocal tones. And where the mini-album seemed a perfect length, suggesting limited appeal for the narrow trough they plough, ‘The Repulsion Box’ is full of static charge with the ideas it packs in.
Record highlight ‘Dance Me In’ thrashes like a possessed banshee, tastefully shot, ‘Choked’ crawls lower to the ground under stuttered strobes, and the fabulous ‘Taste The Last Girl’ and ‘Hunt’ sound like The Proclaimers tied to a flaming steak with 3 minutes a piece to make their case. It sounds thrillingly true to itself too, wringing every last drop of Scot out of their vocals, a feature really tantamount to its devastating successes. Produced by the almost onomatopoeically titled Victor Van Vugt, previous credits including Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, they capture a suitably looming sound, full of long shadows and twists, like a garage rock film noir. And the role of femme fatale has to be an odds-on Oscar contender.