Tegan and Sara released their fifth album, The Con, on July 24, 2007, but the original reviews read more like misogynist clippings from the 1970s. NME called the sisters “little more than twin airbags.” This website offered a confusing and offensive attempt at a compliment stating that “Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock.” The press could only see the siblings, then 26, through the lens of their queerness. Writing for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau, the self-styled “dean of American rock critics,” was confused that this wasn’t, in fact, the focus of their music. “As lesbians who never reference their oppression or even their sexuality,” he wrote, “Tegan and Sara don’t have men to lash out at, put up with or gripe about.” So he gave them something to gripe about: The idea that music made by queer artists should inherently contain shame and struggle is gross, and also overlooks the loathing that oozes from within on The Con.
Besides, they reference those qualities on the record’s very first song. “I Was Married” is a landmark piece of music about gay rights, written by Sara about the civil ceremony she undertook with her American partner so that they could live together in the Quins’ native Canada. It’s practically an a capella song, underpinned only by a small piano motif that turns with clockwork’s ornate simplicity. Sara sounds awed by the sense of ceremony, but equally defiant about her right to it, her voice catching on its distinctive sour, saturated edges. “They seem so very scared of us,” she sings. “I look into the mirror/For evil that just does not exist/I don’t see what they see/Tell them that, tell them that.”
The album starts with these solid institutions, but then The Con falls apart, a profound mutual depression (induced by dying relatives and relationships) obliterating any certainty of self. Longing and self-sabotage chase each other around the void, bodies fracture, senses muddle, time slackens and speeds erratically, and reason slips out of bounds. “I can’t untangle what I feel and what would matter most,” Sara rues on “Relief Next to Me.” On The Con, Tegan and Sara excelled at capturing the shipwrecked upheaval of depression.
Produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, The Con backs up this profound unease with artful invention, and lurches frequently between brittle acoustic-electric melancholy and manic power pop. Sara’s half of the record comprises small, strange, coiled pop songs with spidery arrangements. Tegan’s punkier material seems more straightforward on the surface, but is unhinged by her manic longing, like the breathless momentum at the end of “The Con,” and the chorus of “Nineteen,” where she grits her teeth so hard they could shatter in her jaw. The Con was vanguard, released a decade before pop punk would get its artistic dues and anxious, DIY pop (Sky Ferreira, Chairlift, Waxahatchee) became the sound of a generation. It’s become a touchstone for a wealth of diverse young artists who grew up with a healthy disregard for genre.
To honor its 10th anniversary, the Quins are celebrating themselves with a covers album that highlights the work of these young acts (plus some older affiliates), and benefits their LGBTQIA foundation. Both its triumphs and failures enhance what was so special about the original. Given that compact vocal earworms are Tegan and Sara’s stock in trade, the project might have made more sense as a remix album, though a few artists bring that spirit of reinvention to their covers.
Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens’ version of “Soil Soil” takes just one lyric and steadily inflates it through a luminous glacial wash. Chvrches’ “Call It Off” and Shura’s “The Con” pull a similar trick, effervescing into the ether. Artists like MUNA (“Relief Next to Me”) and Mykki Blanco (on a brilliant, haunted “Knife Going In”) intuitively use anaesthetized, monstrous vocal tones to key into The Con’s sense of psychological dislocation, as do Grimes and HANA (under the name Trashique) on a disappointingly defanged version of “Dark Come Soon.” The best cover on the whole record is relegated to a bonus track: Cyndi Lauper’s version of “Back in Your Head” is manic, chattering, and exuberant, and easily trumps Ryan Adams’ rasping punk interpretation. (The Quins toured with both artists early in their career.)
But Adams’ straightforward cover, like others here, shines a light on the enduring strength of the Quins’ songwriting away from their knotty arrangements (something evident as far back as 2002’s If It Was You, another record that deserves revisiting). There’s a ceremonial beauty to both Bleachers and Paramore’s Hayley Williams’ plainspoken contributions. For “Burn Your Life Down,” Jack Antonoff (who would collaborate with the band on 2013 pop breakthrough Heartthrob) sings close to the microphone, muffled and conciliatory over silvery, treated piano. Tender vocal wibbles and orchestral glints fidget in the background, almost Sufjan-like, but vanish rather than peak. Williams, a long term T&S champion, strips away the white-knuckle guitar chaos of “Nineteen,” a song about teen melodrama, and taps into the innocent side of its romantic youthful delusion. Both versions have a kind of candlelit intimacy to them, acting as votive offerings to the originals.
Other covers show how Tegan and Sara could have tamped down their experimental tendencies and attempted to follow “Walking With a Ghost,” their one radio hit from 2004’s So Jealous, into the mainstream. Canadian Vine star Ruth B (“I Was Married”), Sara Bareilles (“Floorplan”), and City and Color (on a quite horrible “Hop a Plane”) give their songs a saccharine, vocal-oriented sheen that might have seen them taken up as pop-leaning a capella group standards, while PVRIS make “Are You Ten Years Ago” into serviceably overwrought, haunted goth pop, though their slickness steamrollers the original’s panic.
Tegan and Sara could have pursued these simpler routes, but they didn’t, taking an artistic gamble in an industry where the odds were already stacked against their success. Thank god artists like Paramore, Against Me!, and AFI could see in them what critics couldn’t, taking them on the road and noisily singing their praises while the indie press were too cool to take the twins seriously, and that artists like Antonoff, Chvrches, and MUNA picked up their mantle and ran with it. Although shameful to reflect on how crassly The Con was dismissed in 2007, it’s remarkable how much has changed in a decade, and how much credit Tegan and Sara can take for that.
