TEGAN AND SARA

TWIN PEAKS

Tegan and Sara try their hand a percolating synth pop

by Matt Ashare |   Posted February 1, 2013

Now in their thirties, Tegan and Sara have  packed away their acoustic guitars and taken a dive  tween pop.

Okay. So, a couple of things struck me as a little bit strange last year. Not bad strange. Not good strange. Just strange in an interesting sorta way, like maybe there's a pattern or a trend developing here. First, there was Some Nights, the meta-pop blockbuster album by fun. (who I will henceforth simply refer to as Fun), a trio of former indie rockers led by Nate Ruess (formerly of the Format). Released in February, it spawned three huge singles and garnered six Grammy nominations. Oh, and it didn't seem like the sort of ironic gesture you'd expect from a trio of former indie rockers led by Ruess). It seemed, well, genuine.

       And then there was dance-diva party-girl Ke$ha, who showed up months before the eagerly anticipated release of her sophomore album, guest vocalizing on the opening track of a strange little project by twisted alt-rockers the Flaming Lips called The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. No irony there either, at least not as far as I could tell. And then, in late November, there was Warrior, the aforementioned eagerly anticipated sophomore album by dance-diva party-girl Ke$ha, who I'd prefer to refer to as Kesha but one can't expect to win them all. Warrior not only featured a cameo by proto-punk poster boy Iggy Pop, but some dude named Nate Ruess (formerly of the Format) was listed as co-writing the unintentionally controversial first single ("Die Young"). And, if you got the deluxe edition, it included a tune produced by the Flaming Lips, of twisted alt-rock fame.

       If two's a coincidence and three's a trend, then it goes to figure that something interesting, in a strange sorta way, might be in the cultural works, especially since I forgot to mention that last year also saw the release of an unfortunately disappointing major-label album by the Gossip, a once very hip indie-punk trio from Arkansas-by-way-of-Olympia who threw caution to the wind and tried gussying up their sound with arena-rock production and a little synth sheen, although I think the latter may have been ironic. Not that there isn't a long and storied tradition of such transformations, like when Blondie, punkish denizens of NYC's seedy CBGB's scene, embraced the enemy (at the time it was known as disco), and scored mainstream moolah with "Heart of Glass." Plus, a lot of hip alt/punk/indie-rockers have unironically touted the intrinsic artistic value of Abba and the Carpenters and I think even Kelly Clarkson, although I'm not 100% on that. But, I'm fairly certain most of us can agree that there's a qualitative difference between throwing "SOS" or "Miss Independent" on a mixtape and spending lots of time and money trying to sound like Abba or Clarkson.

       In any case, nagging concerns that my zeitgeist radar might be on the fritz have been anecdotally and rather amusingly put on hold with the arrival of Heartthrob, the primly and not at all ironically titled seventh album by Tegan and Sara, a "band,” or as allmusic.com calls them, a "folk-rock duo" that take their name from a pair of identical twin sisters, Tegan Rain and Sara Keirsten Quinn. Born September 19, 1980, they were 18 when they won Calgary's esteemed Garage Warz battle of the bands, and not much older than that when their major label debut, The Business of Art, came out on Vapor, a Warner Bros. imprint run by Neil Young and his manager. They were awfully cute, convincingly earnest, and pretty good at harmonizing wholesomely about the intense ennui of being awfully cute, and convincingly earnest in 2000, the year Brittney Spears was having her way with the charts with "Oops. . . I Did It Again." They even got to tour with Neil Young. And, by 2005, Tegan and Sara had set some sort of dubious record when the thoughtful TV drama Grey's Anatomy featured seven of their songs, and the White Stripes covered one of them ("Walking Like a Ghost). They'd essentially become the indie equivalent of Indigo Girls, or something like that. Which isn't a bad gig, right?

       Well, maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be because, by 2007's The Con, the twins were moving off script. They dropped the folk and pivoted toward another awfully cute and convincingly earnest genre, emo-pop, with help from Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla, Weezer's Matt Sharp, and some dude from AFI. Apparently, that didn't quite cut it in terms of artistic fulfillment or, perhaps, commercial returns.

       So, having made the crucial and often painful crossover from twentysomething to thirtysomethingscarier, Tegan and Sara are in the midst of a major rebranding operation. No longer content to reflect introspectively on the paradoxical complexities of the examined life, they've lightened their mental load, bought into the pop narcotic, packed away the acoustic guitars, and put themselves in the hands of Greg Kurstin, a producer/song-doctor who's credits coincidentally include Ke$ha and Kelly Clarkson. Bingo!

       It's a pretty major left turn, one that makes up for any lack of subtlety with unabashedly blatant disregard for anything resembling subtlety. Which is to say, Heartthrob doesn't waste time easing any longtime fans of Tegan and Sara outta the contemplative coffee house and onto the dirty dancefloor. "Let's make things physical/I won't treat you like you're typical," the sisters sing on "Closer," the disc's sexed-up opener, which also has a couple of awkward lines that I'm pretty sure address the question of who's going to be on top once they're, you know, in bed. (For reasons of taste, I will, at this point, refrain from pointing out that those sentiments are voiced by twin sisters, raising all kinds of interesting questions that I'm not even going to allude to.)

       The production is pure sugar, with a thumping house electro-beat anchoring plenty of percolating synths and an ebullient melody that fizzes like a freshly cracked can of Fresca. That’s about as rique as Tegan and Sara get on Heartthrob. Like most of the songs here, the oddly upbeat “Goodbye” is, as advertised, a polite kiss-off to a guy who just wasn’t cutting it. The slower, more deliberate, and kinda sad “I Was a Fool” actually includes the line, “I was a fool for love,” which is marginally better than “I was a fool 4 luv.” And, “Drove Me Wild,” with its pulsing synths, is peppered with insights like, “When I picture you/I think of your smile/And it drives me wild.” (“Drives Me Mild” would have been a funnier, if no less appropriate, title.)

       Tegan and Sara may have aged a bit. But they’re still awfully cute and perhaps a little too convincingly earnest given the general gist of “Heartthrob” — i.e., synthetic production meets synthetic emotions in a sanitized world of pitch-corrected harmonies. I mean, “How Come You Don’t Want Me” would be a clever spoof of teen angst, only it’s not because the girls, their voices sounding oddly robotic, are genuinely posing that question to a dude who at least one of them — I’m not sure which — has seen walking by her house with a different girl.

       So, this is where I do an about-face and, overlooking the perversity of two grown women raiding their high school diaries for song content, concede that Heartthrob is a whole lotta fun, if not a little bit Fun-ish. Tegan and Sara haven’t sold out so much as they’ve doubled down on an investment that might just yield some serious Gossip Girl exposure. Or, something like that. I’m not sure where this clash of cultures might lead, but my spirits are buoyed by track number eight, the movingly thoughtful “Love They Say.” As Tegan and Sara sing it, “You don’t need to wonder/If love will make us stronger/There’s nothing love can’t do.” Amen.