TEGAN AND SARA - The Con

MapleMusic
Published August 9, 2007  by Elizabeth Chorney-Booth in Record Reviews

Tegan and Sara have come a long way since their early days in Calgary as teenage Ani DiFranco wannabes. If The White Stripes’ 2005 cover of their “Walking with a Ghost” (originally from T&S’s 1994 album So Jealous) didn’t buy the twins some extra hipster cred, The Con certainly will. The album is Tegan and Sara’s most indie rock record to date — and not just because it was produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla and features performances by The Rentals’s Matt Sharp and AFI’s Hunter Burgan. The Quin sisters take their usual brand of angst-pop and turn on the gas with more intense arrangements, increasingly sophisticated lyrics and an urgency that surpasses their previous albums.
    None of this is to say that The Con is perfect. For every great song like “Knife Going In,” there’s a dud (“Nineteen”), and at times, both the musical tracks and the Quins’ voices start to sound gratingly inorganic. Still, with the growing division between Sara and Tegan’s individual vocal and songwriting styles and the moments of bombastic rock, The Con is a good indication that the duo are continuing to grow for the better.



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