Tegan_And_Sara-Heartthrob-2013-C4

Tegan And Sara - Heartthrob


Label.........................: Vapor/Warner Bros.
Genre.........................: Indie
StoreDate.....................: Jan-29-2013
Source........................: CDDA
Grabber.......................: Exact Audio Copy (Secure Mode)
Encoding Scheme...............: Lame 3.98.4 V0 VBR Joint-Stereo
Size..........................: 66.01 MB
Total Playing Time............: 36:27

Release Notes:

It’s hard to have a long career in pop music. Just
ask all the one-hit wonders and sophomore slumpers, all the
sure things who turned out to be yesterday’s news. It’s hard
to keep a band together, hard to hold the fans’ attention.
And it’s really, really hard to keep writing good songs,
record after record, year after year.

Only a relative handful of artists have the vision
and creative stamina to keep on going for the long haul,
and most of them turn out to be shape-shifters, evolving and
changing course as they go, trying on different personas
and musical styles, surprising and sometimes disturbing their
faithful followers—psychedelic Beatles, Christian Dylan,
muscular Bruce, mystical Madonna. You can’t keep moving
unless you’re willing to shake it up every now and then, to
duck into a nearby phone booth and step out in tights and a
cape.

Which brings us to Tegan and Sara, and their
stunning new record, Heartthrob. If you know and love
Tegan and Sara’s music, as I do, the exuberant, polished
sound of Heartthrobwill come as a shock, almost a
deliberate provocation. What happened to those neurotic,
self-deprecating indie rockers, the twins from Canada
obsessively chronicling their crushes and heartbreaks?
When did they become so confident and radio-friendly, so
unapologetically mainstream? Are Tegan and Sara pop
stars? Why would they even want to be?

After all, it would have been easy enough for
Tegan and Sara to just make another record, keep the old
machine humming. Things have been going well for them
for a long time. Six albums in thirteen years, a passionately
devoted international audience, some serious brushes with
commercial success, an impressive catalogue of consistently
wonderful songs, to my mind one of the most striking and
underrated bodies of work in the past decade. But they
finished their last tour feeling oddly dissatisfied. They
weren’t kids anymore—they’d just turned thirty, and they
wanted more. They felt restless, couldn’t understand why
they weren’t reaching more people. So Tegan and Sara took
a deep breath and a long look in the mirror, and popped
into that nearby phone booth.

And out came Heartthrob.

“No one will confuse this with any of our other
records,” Sara says. “It’s got a bigger, bolder, happier
sound.” Tegan is explicit about the supersized ambitions
motivating the record. “I kept asking myself: Can I hear this
in an arena? Can I hear this on a teenager’s iPod as they’re
riding the bus to school?”

The new album doesn’t just sound different, it
represents a more collaborative way of making music. For
the first time, the sisters actually wrote a lot of the songs
together (in the past there were Tegan songs and Sara
songs), and they surrendered more control than usual in the
studio, dividing songs between 3 producers (Greg Kurstin,
Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and Mike Elizondo) and a handful
of outside musicians to capture the sound they were looking
for. Tegan and Sara are both effusive about Kurstin’s role in
the process.

“We intentionally went looking for a producer
who wouldn’t dwell on protecting the signature Tegan and
Sara sound,” Tegan explains. Sara sums up Kurstin’s role
with a surprising metaphor: “Greg took everything we do
and put it on steroids.”

For all the superficial differences, though,
Heartthrobbears the true hallmarks of a Tegan and Sara
record. The songs are terrific, full of lust and longing and
regret, bouncing between the familiar poles of erotic rapture
(“Closer”) and post-breakup despondency (“How Come You
Don’t Want Me”). But the lyrics seem less confessional than
usual, a little more universal and philosophical, as if Tegan
and Sara are reflecting on the experience of passion rather
than undergoing its ecstasies and torments in real time. For
every urgent outburst—“Does your body shake when you
get around me? Does your body ache when you think about
me?” (“I Couldn’t Be Your Friend”)—there’s a moment of calm
reflection, a retrospective clarity about past relationships:
“When I think of you I think of your skin golden brown from
the sun/Your arms outstretched your hair cut shorter than
it'd been /But still blowing in the wind” (“Drove Me Wild”).
There’s a hard-won maturity in these lyrics, hidden beneath
the glossy surface of the music, and a willingness to tackle
subjects beyond the confines of romance. This is especially
evident in the striking song, “I’m Not Your Hero,” which
examines the difficulty of maintaining artistic independence
and personal autonomy in a politicized world: “I’m not their
hero but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t brave/I never walked
the party line doesn’t mean that I was never afraid.”

Heartthrobgives us Tegan and Sara in their
superhero tights and capes, ready to conquer the pop
universe, and the new outfits suit them just as well as their
old-school jeans and T-shirts. Don’t be surprised if you hear
these songs in an arena, or blasting on a car radio, or
leaking from a teenager’s earbuds on a bus. That’s what
they’re made for. And don’t worry if you experience a brief
sense of disorientation the first couple of times you hear
them, a momentary inability to put a name to those familiar
voices. By the time you realize who you’re listening to, you’ll
already be singing along.


Tracklisting

01. Closer 3:29
02. Goodbye, Goodbye 3:26
03. I Was A Fool 3:24
04. I'm Not Your Hero 3:51
05. Drove Me Wild 3:49
06. How Come You Don't Want Me 2:51
07. I Couldn't Be Your Friend 4:19
08. Love They Say 3:34
09. Now I'm All Messed Up 4:08
10. Shock To Your System 3:36


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