tegan and sara - i need some direction/convincing

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i heard about them a lot passively (esp here over the years), and i KNOW i've see the odd song/video that i liked. but i recently acquired (hem hem) most of their albums, and clicking about on the ipods i'm not all that struck.

:-/

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

They're pretty hit or miss for me. I loved their The Con album from c. 2 years ago, favorite song from it is "Nineteen" (calllll meeeeeee), but the new album does nothing for me whatsoever.



I think the key is that their hooks tend to be straight out of some build-a-hook ABC's-of-songwriting book, repeated without much in-song development, so the key is actually identifying with the stuff in the song as well as the really obvious melody hook. (Marc Hogan aptly described one of their tunes as a "commercial jingle," which he meant derisively but I think can be a compliment!)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Problem with finding a way in through their lyrics is that their lyrics alternate between totally cryptic and totally sappy (or sappy-cryptic) and it's difficult for them to hit the middle-ground where their best songs tend to happen. (E.g., "I was nineteen / Call me" strikes me as an excellent lyric, simple and evocative, but it's pretty bare-bones prose, no great effort to make some kinda dodgy poetic metaphor out of it, which they seem to do a lot on the new one.)