Some people will see this album as two experienced songwriters delving into pop music and subverting it, but Tegan & Sara don’t push any boundaries or turn any tables - they simply conform to the standard, predictable key changes and hooks that you might expect on any commonplace, anonymous pop album. At its best, Love You To Death may serve as a bait-and-switch, encouraging new audiences to seek out their old, clearly better material. Tegan & Sara are both quite charismatic, so it feels wrong that this album would feel so devoid of personality. But too often, the album is just generic. At its best moments, it sounds like stream-lined, comfortable, and fun pop music (“U-Turn”, for example). While Heartthrob had a handful of songs that were unqualified gems (e.g.,”Shock To Your System”, “Love They Say”, “I Was A Fool”), Love You To Death provides no such comforts. I wish that I could say that the rest of Love You To Death fared better (and some of it does), but the majority of it stays at this adolescent level of maturity. But I don’t want to be your secret anymore.” Not only do “best friend” and “boyfriend” not rhyme, but this sounds like it was stolen out of a thirteen year old’s LiveJournal. You turn me on like you would your boyfriend. Call me up like you would your best friend. It’s got a fine enough melody for the chorus, but let’s take a look at the lyrics: “You treat me like your boyfriend. Take “Boyfriend”, one of the singles launched ahead of Love You To Death. The music sounds like it was created using a simulator, and the lyrics are such broad generalizations that they lack almost all meaning. Kurstin is back, this time as the sole producer of the record, but the two songwriters of “Don’t Rush”, “The Con”, “The First”, or “Relief Next To Me” are completely absent. Tegan & Sara’s new album, Love You To Death, is less of an extension of Hearththrob than it is a distillation of its essence. The problem is when a band ditches what made them good in the first place and replaces it with something less personal, less interesting, and less emotionally-involved. It’s what David Bowie did multiple times in his career ( Hunky Dory, Young Americans, Scary Monsters, The Next Day). Again, there’s nothing wrong with pop music, and there’s nothing wrong with non-pop artists changing their format to be more audience-friendly. Produced primarily by Greg Kurstin, Heartthrob sounded more like the artists that Kurstin normally works with rather than Tegan & Sara: Lily Allen, Sia, or Kelly Clarkson. Instead, they went all-in to synthesizer-laden, saccharine pop music, measured with drum machines and an abundance of compression. Tegan & Sara were no longer interested in trying to prove their indie bona fides. No longer was one of the members from Death Cab For Cutie producing them. No longer were members of AFI recording with them. With Heartthrob, Tegan & Sara embraced pop in the purest sense. The turning point was 2013’s Hearththrob. Albums like The Con and Sainthood were slick and polished, but each album - and every song - felt personal. Unlike most pop music, it didn’t feel like junk food. And for years, Tegan & Sara wrote earnest, strong pop songs with an independent bent. The “magic” there, though, is that “Walking with the Ghost” is not a pop song in a conventional sense. It’s got multiple hooks, and they are repeated so much that they almost feel like looped samples. Take one of their early hits, “Walking with the Ghost”, for example. The two started as a charismatic duo, mixing elements of pop music with the indie world. But it’s a phrase that comes up a lot with Tegan & Sara Quin the past few years. “Selling out” is a phrase that means a lot of things to a lot of people, so much so that it’s basically lost meaning. Tegan and Sara appeal to your inner adolescent in a disappointing new album.
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