BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - June 2016

ALBUM REVIEWS
Tegan and Sara
Love You To Death
Warner Music Canada
It’s been ten years since the Calgary-born Tegan
and Sara’s career-defining The Con (2007)
dropped. That album saw the talented fingers
of Kaki King, Chris Walla and Jason McGerr of
Death Cab for Cutie, among others help grease
the chains of Tegan and Sara’s raw indie rock.
Few songwriters can pen and perform such
shiver-inducing lyrics as “maybe I would have
been something you’d be good at,” from closing
track “Call it Off,” with as much vulnerability
and emotional resonance as Tegan and Sara.
Synths sirened through the dry acoustic guitars
of the title track while the two singers sang
percussively on top of each other, carefully
squeezing chamber-pop influences into their
bedroom pop recording aesthetic. Those same
synth leads hit hard on almost every track of
new record Love You To Death, but nine years
and ten buckets of glitter later, the duo’s music
is almost unrecognizable, for better or worse.
When Heartthrob’s (2013) single “Closer”
dropped, it signaled a confident move into polished
mainstream-ready pop music. The track
pops to life with massive synth chords while
the titular lyric bleeds out of pitch defiantly,
a quiet reminder of the duo’s indie origins.
The chorus features the triumphantly belted
“let’s make things physical” over a sharp drum
line. The expensive-sounding, detail-intensive
production lubricated the song for top 40 radio
consumption, while the charm and indelible
songwriting that typify Tegan and Sara grounded
the song in relatability. The record that
followed was polished at every corner, possibly
to a fault, but as a move into synth-pop, it came
across as authentically as it could have, and it
skewed towards sharper drums, dirtier synths,
and retained a few guitar tracks, all of which
are shelved entirely for Love You To Death.
Heartthrob propelled the duo into Taylor
Swift-opening glory, and as pop stars go, you
could do a lot worse than Tegan and Sara.
Their unique style and narrative, humble
origins, and characteristic doubling, demands
twice the stage. Nothing about Tegan and
Sara has ever felt written or manufactured.
Love You to Death is lovingly imagined, but
wholly sterile in ways that Tegan and Sara’s
music has never been, even with the added
sheen of Heartthrob. Lead single “Boyfriend”
opens with strangely familiar, effervescent
electronics. Not familiar in a nostalgic sense
however, but rather, reminiscent of other
currently successful pop acts, and of course,
the young producers whose music those acts
borrow from. It refrains from being an explicitly
tropical-house track or anything that
deliberative, but the production on “Boyfriend”
carries the ‘80s inflected pop song directly
into the currently musical moment in the least
climactic way possible. The boring arrangement
on this track is doubly disappointing because
it is so easy to envision a more interesting
instrumental, considering Tegan and Sara
have offered us so many in the past. “Boyfriend”
is, at its heart, a smartly written track
about the complications of dating someone
whose sexual aim and/or orientation is in flux,
or at least not perfectly centered. The song
is progressive, socially nuanced, and most
importantly for the genre, endlessly catchy.
That said, the hammy beat drops and floaty
vocals turn the song into an unwanted remix
of itself, and not in the cool “Ignition” sense.
Further, the explicitly themes of “Boyfriend”
offer a strong reminder of how Tegan and
Sara’s identities as gay women has been such
a quotable part of their musical mythos from
day one. The duo has never used either as a
gimmick or a crutch, but rather, the love songs
abound throughout their discography have
held a level of gendered ambiguity, and thus
moments where their sexuality comes out
explicitly, feel stronger in their infrequency.
Thankfully, this is also true on Love You to
Death. “Stop Desire” most notably uses its title
and chorus to confidently emote the undeniability
of both female, although more specifically,
lesbian, sexual and romantic desire.
Strong pop song-writing like this permeates
the entire record on tracks like the almost-heartbreaking
sparkle-piano ballad “100x,”
and the obvious album standout “U-Turn.” The
latter track emotes the confidence the project
is contingent on more strongly than elsewhere
on the record, and the more muted arrangement
suits the song’s lyrical reliance. The witty quip
“Make a change or this is gonna stall / Shape up
or you’ll drop me like a call” perfectly prefaces
the punchy chorus. “I wanna write a love
song / even though you never asked me for
one” carries both the confidence of the duo’s
newfound pop stardom, as well as a profound
sense of self-awareness. The charming contradiction
therein is that the song is about writing
a love song and not a love song. Moments
like these carry the legacy of wit and wonder
that Tegan and Sara that lose some of their
impact from the overly shiny arrangements.
“B/W/U” is the most reminiscent cut on
the record, offering a sparse electronic bed
with lo-fi drum machines and clean synth
arpeggios. The intro and post-chorus have a
slow and cute electric-piano lead that calls to
mind former producer Chris Walla’s influence,
although even this track feels all-too-perfectly
pitched and polished, a clear reminder
that T&S’ Chris Walla days are over.
It feels strange to suggest something so
cliché, but Love You to Death listens more like
what studio executives probably Tegan and
Sara should sound like than what has made
them such a tour-de-force. Such a sentiment
feels doubly strange considering they have been
major-label produced for almost ten years, thus
the new, overly glossy production is certainly a
stylistic choice by Tegan and Sara themselves.
As an exercise in pop song-writing, Tegan
and Sara offer a master class, but the arrangement
feels stuck in high school. Love You to
Death is a stall for Tegan and Sara, not necessarily
a misstep, not necessarily an all-time-low,
but not entirely free of disappointment either.
Written by Liam Prost
Illustration by Dylan Smith
June 2016 REVIEWS
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