Tegan and Sara
So Jealous (Vapor)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Nashville Scene, July 21-27, 2005

The basic bio for Tegan and Sara is straightforward enough: the Quin sisters started performing together as teenagers in Calgary, playing their guitars at friends’ parties before winning a battle of the bands in 1998. Two albums followed, Under Feet Like Ours and This Business of Art. Both records presented the duo as a tag-team Ani DiFranco, but on 2002’s If It Was You, the game changed. With help from a production team made up of New Pornographers bassist John Collins and Smugglers guitarist David Carswell, Tegan and Sara transformed themselves from rhythm-focused folk confessionalists into sparkplug popsters, a progression that continues on their latest album, So Jealous.

Tegan and Sara are identical twins, and there’s a dilemma that faces identical twins who make pop music—namely, how best to deal with the tension between being individuals and honoring the connection between them. Some acts have sidestepped this quandary either by sticking to the background, like The Shangri-Las’ Marge and Mary Ann Ganser or Spandau Ballet’s Martin and Gary Kemp, or by ignoring the problem altogether, like Good Charlotte’s Joel and Benji Madden. Others, like the Breeders’ Kim and Kelley Deal, distribute their responsibilities unevenly, while still others, like Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, Evan and Jaron Lowenstein or the Proclaimers’ Craig and Charlie Reid, split their duties so fairly they become indistinguishable. All of these approaches have worked to varying extents, but none of them really balances both sides of the equation.

Tegan and Sara seem to have solved that problem, as So Jealous finds a way for both of them to carve out their own identities while still acknowledging their bond. The latter issue isn’t as irrelevant to their music as it might first seem, even if few of the abovementioned acts took advantage of the fact that their physical similarities extended to their vocal cords. The Quins’ voices—each sings in an astringent, throaty yelp—resist easy, comfortable harmony, resulting in an urgency fueled by both the character and the friction of the sound. Except that even that’s not what it seems, since what sounds like the sisters singing together is just a multi-tracked illusion. Tegan sings on Tegan’s songs and Sara sings on Sara’s songs, and vocal cross-pollination—like that captured in the making-of documentary on the CD-Rom portion of So Jealous, where Tegan insists that Sara provide the backing vocals in the chorus of “Take Me Anywhere”—is rare. Both might contribute instrumentally to every track, but when it comes to their voices, it’s generally every Quin for herself, leaving them free to explore on their own and find out who they are as individuals instead of as identical parts of a undifferentiated whole.

Of the two, Tegan is more of a pop classicist, unabashedly aiming for hooks; “My songs,” she argues on the CD-Rom track, “are about dynamics.” Take, for example, the album-opening “You Wouldn’t Like Me.” It begins with an acoustic guitar played as much for its percussive effect as for its harmonic contribution, as two Tegans sing, “There’s a war inside of me / Do I cause new heartbreak to write a new broken song? / Do I push it down or let it run me right in to the ground?” As a keyboard jumps in and tugs the song into the chorus, she adds a line that armchair psychologists would have a field day with: “I feel like I wouldn’t like me if I met me.”

Bit by bit, the track becomes more and more fleshed out—an electric guitar comes in, more vocals join, a drumbeat finally emerges—until the song reaches a coda that practically drowns in its own euphoria, even as the singer admits, “Sunshine is days away / I won’t be saved.” Elsewhere, “Take Me Anywhere” coils with tension as it builds to the chorus, and both “Speak Slow” and “I Won’t Be Left” harness the New Wave cast that suffuses the entire album without fetishizing it like many the current revivalists. Lyrically, Tegan is consistently self-deprecating and fatalistic, with a remarkable clarity; for all the pop pleasure generated by the abovementioned songs, she can’t help but acknowledge her own flaws and worries in lines like “You say you don’t see any part of me to love in all this mess” (“Take Me Anywhere”) and “Would you like the company or are you sick of me?” (“Speak Slow”), while “I Won’t Be Left” begins with the words “I won't mistake you for problems with me.”

By contrast, Sara’s songs are more abstract and modular, refusing to rely on easy hooks or traditional song structures to make their points. On “I Bet It Stung,” she powers the song with a churning electric guitar figure as the time signature switches unnervingly from 4/4 to 5/4 and back again. “We Didn’t Do It” is a series of simple, repeated lyrics sung over an insistent guitar stutter and a drum part that seems to reset itself every few beats, until the song shifts to a bridge fitted with an overpowering post-punk synthesizer and vocal harmonies that fall just this side of discord.

Sara’s centerpiece, though, is the title track, with a verse underscored by a throbbing keyboard connected via a brief acoustic pulse to a chorus featuring a hyper-strummed guitar and a synth that overpowers her. “I get so jealous that I can’t even work,” she protests through the maelstrom, but the object of her envy, and the reason for it, remains ambiguous through the imagery that she evokes.

Ultimately, then, the image of a perfectly shared musical journey that the twins project is a bit of a hedge, although things even out a bit more onstage, where the sisters can’t use technology to clone themselves and have to make due with the job that nature did for them. But there’s a common perspective throughout So Jealous, with every song directed at a clearly drawn “you,” making each one an address, rather than a recounting. The Quins’ material is something that is happening now, in the present, not something that has already occurred and is simply being mulled over. It’s a point of view that binds Tegan and Sara, and in combining their complementary approaches to their shared approach, the two women manage to be exactly the same and completely different.

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