Musings Often in Stereo

It’s a long-standing fact that Canada cannot put out good music.  Canadian music either falls into a category inhabited by artists like Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, Anne Murray, and Nickelback; or into one exemplified by Neil Young, John Samson of the Weakerthans, et al.  Canadian music, essentially, is either is a synonym for terrible or for perfection.

Enter Tegan and Sara Quin, a pair of Toronto twins schooled on the better school of Canadian rock laced with a healthy dose of Bruce Springsteen (see their tender rendition of “Dancing In The Dark” for an example).  Add the fact that they’re both lesbians and you create a stew of passionate, beautiful, and occasionally subversive anger.  Their 2007 effort, The Con, may be the best exposition of their style, as well as their myriad of quirks.

One quirk is their seemingly disparate sounds.  Twins are said to have near ESP from their DNA being nearly identical (particularly identical ones like the Quins), yet Tegan and Sara both write vastly different songs.  Tegan’s are usually more straight-forward pop anthems typified by “Nineteen,” possibly the best song about the chemistry between love and sexual frustration released this year.  Sara, on the other hand, writes more obtuse and dissonant song-scapes that mess with the harmonic quirks between their mainly similar voices.  “Floorplan” is the prime example of this phenomena, with lush layers of acoustic guitar mixed with offbeat rhythms and constant minor keying.

However, the ESP aspect creates an intriguing thread throughout the album, tying a sort of angst and emotion from their shared experiences through musically different songs.  The themes usually center around problems with relationships, including infidelity (“Back in Your Head” and, to a non-superficial extent, the title track) and the eventual breakup (the oddly touching “Call It Off”).  Possibly due to their shared sexuality or simply through the ability to identify with family best, each song seems like each girl felt the exact same as her counterpart.  It’s equal parts beautiful and unsettling.

The girls banked on this ability to make beauty out of pain and, in the process, have made a set of songs that rank up there as some of the catchiest of the year.  “Nineteen,” “The Con,” and “Back in Your Head” will end up scoring your life for an eternity simply because you will be unable to think of any other songs.  The problem, however, is the sequencing.  Because of the sonic disparity between Tegan and Sara, you find yourself jumping from jarring, arrhythmic minor masterpieces to soaring pop anthems without breaks or interludes.  As a set of EPs with Tegan on one and Sara on the other, The Con would be a genuine masterpiece.  As a disjoint LP, it suffers.