Sunday music video: Tegan and Sara

Canadian indie rock twin sister act, Tegan and Sara, have a new album out – The Con. It’s a kinda narrative album, as this review says:

Tegan and Saraâ??s fourth full-length, The Con, begins with a glossy, nostalgic elegy to a marriage, a vocal duet timed to a walk down the aisleâ??and itâ??s completely out of place with what follows. But this works because â??I Was Marriedâ?? is the credit sequence to an otherwise messy drama propelled by two haughty, terrified, confused characters. Who gets to confess here, and when, is a question the listener may have asked on the sistersâ?? previous releases. But before, each of their love stories were gracefully enmeshed. Here, itâ??s hard not to read every track as a tribute to one particular and tumultuous event (which Iâ??m going to propose happened to Tegan). So, most potently, the con or cons involved are immersed in a battle of push-pull spanning months or years. There is less of the rock straight talk of 2004â??s So Jealous, simply because the situations are written in more complicated terms. Whether this always makes a great song is another issue. To a T&S fan, a journey from simpler relationships to more complex ones also means one from accessibility to ambiguity.

Interestingly, it’s accompanied by video “chapters” posted on YouTube. But I’ve got a bitch about that. The teganandsaramusic channel doesn’t feature them all, and they’re not posted sequentially on their record label’s channel. But it’s worth the effort of sorting through to play them in order, particularly for anyone who’s been charmed by the sisters’ banter and story-telling in their live shows.

The con in question is indeed ambiguous, and only part of the ambiguity lies in the marriage theme and the well known fact that Tegan and Sara are from the well known “Canadian lesbian sisters” genre!

Oh, and here’s a fave from their Australian tour – their cover of Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark: