![]() people are either gonna like the music or not.” I was teaching myself to play guitar poorly, and A. burned copies for me, printing off a black-and-white inkjet cover with a quote from Tegan: “When it’s all said and done, I’m still gonna be a girl, I’m still gonna be young, and I’m still gonna be a twin. Their second record, This Business of Art, came out in 2000, and in 2001 the label rereleased the twins’ indie debut. They’d made and released their first album, Under Feet Like Ours, independently when they were just 19 and signed with Neil Young’s Vapor Records shortly thereafter. Tegan and Sara, T & S - queer identical twins from Calgary who were slapping out songs on acoustic guitar that were everything we wanted: pretty and pissy and real.Īt 21, Tegan and Sara were only six years older than us - a degree of adulthood that seemed aspirational. H., whose singing voice was otherworldly, had found her way into a sorta-band with a girl who was older than us, cooler, and gay, and I suspect that she was the original source for the good word. It was 2001 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’s notoriously clean and bland capital, and we were in the 10th grade. was patient zero for our Tegan and Sara fandom. ![]() But Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up instead, there’s something loose-ended about it-like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.My friend H. It’s understandable that Tegan and Sara are caught in some endless transit between the pop-punk of their 2000s output and the gloss of their 2010s work the past few years have seen the pair release full-album reinterpretations of both The Con and So Jealous, write a memoir, and have that memoir turned into a TV show. Not every song feels as deft, and many lack the incisive specificity that is the Quins’ trademark: The maudlin synth-ballad “Yellow” in particular, with its chorus of “this bruise ain’t black, it’s yellow/My sweet heart sings out like the devil” feels unusually confused, caught up in swampy attempts at wordplay. Touching on ideas of reliving unhealthy relationship dynamics over and over, it’s an appealingly spiky song, one far more sharply realized than much of the rest of the record. “I Can’t Grow Up” plays like a brighter, more melodic take on electroclash, with its yelped, anxious verses (“You spin me ‘round again/Twist my head until you hear ‘pop’”) providing some of the record’s most exciting, full-blooded moments. ![]() ![]() The overwhelming flavor of Crybaby is pitched-up ornamental vocal sample, and it gives the album an embarrassing pungency, like milk left out of the fridge a minute too long the technique appears on nearly every song, and it means that even the best songs here-brash opener “I Can’t Grow Up”, lovely would-be country ballad “Faded Like a Feeling,” the devastatingly weary “Whatever That Was”-feel like they’re demos recorded in 2014.Īt times, Crybaby does actually manage to identify potential new paths forward for Tegan and Sara. So Crybaby is stuck in a strange middle ground between big-budget indie and low-budget pop: it’s all yelped vocals and the kind of vocal processing that Skrillex and Diplo popularized with “ Where Are Ü Now,” which then proceeded to dominate pop for the next five or so years. Working with producer John Congleton-who, ironically, is better known for working with artists like Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten to make their records sound bigger, not smaller-the pair actively attempt to scuff up the pristine finish of their recent output, bringing guitars and live drums back to the fore and embracing shaggier song structures and roughed up vocals.Īt the same time, Tegan and Sara clearly can’t entirely let go of pop music. Crybaby attempts to return, at least in part, to the hook-driven indie-rock of the band’s earlier records.
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