![]() ![]() It’s become a touchstone for a wealth of diverse young artists who grew up with a healthy disregard for genre. 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. 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. Sara’s half of the record comprises small, strange, coiled pop songs with spidery arrangements. 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. “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. 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. 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. “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.” “They seem so very scared of us,” she sings. 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. It’s practically an a capella song, underpinned only by a small piano motif that turns with clockwork’s ornate simplicity. “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. ![]() Besides, they reference those qualities on the record’s very first song.
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