An old advertisement for the first two singles by the Portland (Oregon) band Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre described the singer, a young woman called Ida No, as " a haywired android " who " is half Ziggy Stardust, half Alan Vega " ; her backing band were lauded as a gang of " death disco deadbeats. " In so much of American consumer culture, the commercial is better than the product — so it’s a relief now and again to get exactly what you’ve paid for. Glass Candy’s debut album, Love Love Love (Troubleman Unlimited), would be a pleasure even if all it did was dance on the grave of the heavy, sci-fi glam rock embodied by the Spiders from Mars. And though that’s far from the only reason to recommend it, the disc seems to bode well for the dark spirits of goth’s pre-industro-metal past. One has only to look to the last album by Omaha New Order enthusiasts the Faint to intuit that there’s a renewed enthusiasm among indie boys for dancing to the beat of the living dead. That zombie-disco brats the Vanishing manage to sound absolutely nothing like Marilyn Manson on their new Songs for Psychotic Children (Gold Standard Labs) is reason to celebrate.

Love Love Love is a modest effort: of its eight numbers, two are covers, and almost all the songs have been previously released, in different versions, over the past two years. But theirs is a modesty with a purpose. The band have no Web page and no street team. They made four national tours without releasing a proper CD, instead issuing an oddball array of hastily recorded singles, a live, one-sided 12-inch EP, and a series of limited-edition tour-only demo CD-R’s packaged to evoke the exclusivity of the punk-rock tape-trading underground. The approach recalls the rock underground of the ’70s and ’80s, in which fans were required to seek out underground bands on their own with scant information to guide them, so that the music took on the aura of a shared secret.

In the beginning, there wasn’t much to recommend them: the first Glass Candy single, " Brittle Women, " served up just a bass line and a shriek. But their second, " Metal Gods " (no relation to the Judas Priest song of the same name) backed with a cover of " I Wanna Hurt, " by the late-’70s Los Angeles synth-punk/performance-art group the Screamers, has the iconic luster of a perfect novelty disc. Ida’s croaking, vibrato-shaken warble is a direct homage to Bowie; the songs lurch along on standard-issue 4/4 disco stomp, walloping two-note bass lines, and a scraggle of microwave-fried synth zaps stolen from ’80s horror movies. Headline: " Martian vampires drive a stake through Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’! "

On their most recent round of demos, Glass Candy were showing signs of evolution — their " Lady from the Black Lagoon " could pass for the sanitarium cabaret of Hunky Dory. But with roughly three albums’ worth of material to draw from, they made Love Love Love a greatest-hits album, re-recording material from their singles and demos with a line-up that now includes an appropriately Mick Ronson–styled guitarist. They’ve reined in the synths and loosened up their flatfoot disco beats while keeping the guitars raw and the flat crack of the snare up front in the mix. Ida’s voice still sounds enough like Bowie that even when they tackle the Stones’ " The Last Time, " it sounds like Ziggy fronting the Misfits at the cemetery gates. Their own " Nite Nurses " throbs with Steppenwolf-style biker-rock muscle and a psychotronic punk backbeat. The result has the unmistakable feel of a ’70s LP, and there’s something perfectly conceived about its brevity and its focus, a suggestion that album making in the old sense has become a lost art.

Vanishing frontghoul Jesse Eva used to play with Erase Errata’s Jennie Hoyston in Subtonix, a suicide-party goth-punk outfit who toured regularly with Glass Candy and liked to soak themselves, Samhain-style, in fake blood. A guitarless trio who appear to have stepped directly out of Dr. Caligari’s cabinets and into a Sisters of Mercy video, the Vanishing have a Peter Murphy fixation that’s transparent enough that they titled their debut EP In the Bat Haus (Cochon).

But Eva has saved her best horror-show antics for Psychotic Children. Her rapturous wails on " White Walls " and " Terror, I’ve Been Dying To Meet You " are part Siouxsie banshee mating call, part Ian Curtis from-beyond-the-grave warning cry, part Vincent Price monologue. The rhythm section’s disco doom is just as dreary as Joy Division; meanwhile frigid synths work their way from icy gloom into whooshing windswept moonscapes. Their songs are frozen in dread: " Lanterns made of flesh/Their throats slipped through their strangled necks " may not make strict anatomical sense, but you have to admit it’s pretty gross. You can even dance to it. If you dare.

Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre appear this Saturday, June 28, at Axis, 13 Lansdowne Street; call (617) 423-NEXT.