Tegan and Sara’s seventh full-length, last year’s Heartthrob, is a sleek, synth-driven affair rife with the twins’ interweaving vocals and enough hooks to power a dozen less-accomplished albums. It represents the culmination of an evolution that has seen the raven-haired Canadians move from Lilith Fair-nurtured, Indie Folk upstarts to masters of perpetually heartsick Pop Rock.
A glance at Heartthrob’s liner notes reveals that four different producers — including such “industry” bigwigs as Rob Cavallo and Mike Elizondo — had a hand in what has become T&S’s most commercially successful effort to date. Album opener “Closer” is the first sign that the pair is in full radio-friendly mode, its driving beats, video-game bleeps and glossy keyboards set to 10 on the ear-candy meter. “Goodbye, Goodbye,” one of several angst-laden relationship tunes, is just as addictive, with the duo repeatedly telling us, “You never really knew me/Never ever, never ever saw me/Saw me like they did.” It sounds like The Killers minus the macho, arena-baiting bravado. The piano-laden “I Was a Fool” slows the tempo, but the topic is same — love gone bad. Yet all is not hopeless — “Love They Say” somehow gets away such seemingly trite statements as “The first time I saw your face/I knew I was meant for you.”
“Whatever Tegan was writing about was obvious to me and vice versa,” Sara told Spin about the duo’s approach to songwriting, which has evolved over the years — they now collaborate more than they used to. “There’s so much intimacy and shared experience that we’d be dense not to know.”
TEGAN AND SARA perform Thursday, May 8 at Covington's Madison Theater. More info here .
