Carefully selected case studies could convince you anyone can be a star with a well-timed leak, blog post, or P2P push, but there are still few substitutes for good ol' fashioned hard work. Case in point: Tegan and Sara, who have worked their way up from cult status to wider prominence through a steady regimen of touring and a gradual musical evolution and maturation that's made it harder to ignore their increasingly impressive achievements.
Those achievements peaked to date with 2007's The Con, but that shouldn't negate the merits of the Canadian Quin sisters' somewhat likeminded follow-up, Sainthood. The Con, sympathetically produced by Chris Walla, found Tegan and Sara trading the occasional preciousness and banal power-pop tropes of their earlier work for something more eclectic and personal, and Sainthood, which once again enlists Walla, continues to showcase the pair's confidence and peculiarities.
What's different is that the Quins have closed the aperture ever so slightly, retaining some of the character of the album's predecessor while applying a slightly sharper focus to the songs and their musical scope. In theory, tracks like "Don't Rush", "Hell", "The Cure", and "The Ocean" count as power-pop, but tightly wound as they are, they're closer to high-strung 1980s new wave (think: Missing Persons), albeit thankfully short on the attendant affectations and coursing with subtly dark undercurrents. "I've got the cure for you," sings Tegan in "The Cure", and in fact, given the enigmatic lyrics, it's unclear if the object of her attention should accept or refuse the help. Or whether they even have a choice.
Those aforementioned songs, incidentally, are Tegan's-- the more pop-oriented of the pair. But to set up such a dialectic does a disservice to sister Sara, whose own pop instincts clear the quirkier hurdles of songs like "Arrow" or "Red Belt". Certainly, "On Directing" or "Alligator"-- two obvious album highlights, the latter playing like a late-night backroom flip of Madonna's "Holiday"-- don't lack in hooks, but they're developed with a welcome austerity and Sara's disinclination for easy "big moment" build up and release.
Sara's "Sentimental Tune" is no less restrained; it could easily go for Kelly Clarkson bombast, and maybe would even be better for it, but kept in check, that song-- like Sainthood as a whole-- achieves a less immediate but perhaps more gratifying impact. The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect. Which it does, just on its own terms, a broadcast from two idiosyncratic musical minds whose biggest talent may be in making their most eccentric traits sound downright normal. After all, from the Quin twins' perspective it's the audience that's accessible, and they know just how to reach them.
