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By Mikael Wood
IKNOW I T TURNS you off when I get alking like a teen,” sings Sara Quin in “On Directing,” a cut from the sixth studio album by Quin and her twin sister, Tegan. Turnoff or not, talking like teens is precisely what once distinguished this Canadian duo from a nation (a continent!) of similar strummers: On early records—their 1999 debut, Under Feet Like Ours, and 2004 breakthrough So Jealous—Tegan and Sara’s lovelorn ruminations had a deceptively casual verisimilitude, with lyrics that read like instant-message transcripts and arrangements that gave coffee-shop folk some new-wave fizz. The siblings’ intricate harmonies even served to replicate the overlapping layers of tenth-grade conversation.
With 2007’s The Con, though, Tegan and Sara began pushing their music in a more adult direction, toward something darker and less innocent. “Remember when I was sweet and unexplainable?” Sara asked in “Back in Your Head,” over an anxiously tick-tocking guitar and murmuring organ. “Nothing like this person, unlovable.”
That journey away from the juvenile continues on Sainthood, which the Quins say was inspired by “Came So Far for Beauty,” the deeply resigned 1979 ballad by fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen. (For a maturing tunesmith, invoking Cohen is tantamount to a novelist describing her new book as an homage to Tolstoy.) “All I said to you, all I did for you, seems so silly to me now,” Tegan concedes in “The Cure,” a taut jangle-rock number whose title appears to acknowledge the moody keyboard line borrowed from the Cure’s “Lovesong.” Later, in “Night Watch,” Sara insists, “I need distance from your body / I deserve this anguish on my house.” Ever hear a teen utter those words?
Coproduced (as was The
Con) by Chris Walla of Death
Cab for Cutie, Sainthood has
[rating]
••••••••••
Trash Classic
•••••••••• Vapor/Sire
ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH GWILY
DO WNLOAD NE W MP3s AT SPIN.COM / NOVEMBER 2009 71
References:
http://www.myspace.com/teganandsara
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