TMC reviews… Tegan and Sara

by Fairy Cake

I’ll admit it.  Lesbian musicians are pretty under-represented in my record collection.  Tracy Chapman never really did it for me; whenever I hear ‘Fast Car’, I control my radio-mutilating tendencies by imagining the said singer-songwriter driving herself off a cliff.  So when my flatmate thrust a copy of Tegan and Sara’s So Jealous into my hands, with the accompanying sell, “You’ll like them, they’re lezzers”, I was already pretty sure that I wouldn’t.

Luckily for me, So Jealous turned out to be awesome, as did everything else they had released.

And so to my review.  Last week I was lucky enough to smuggle myself in to T+S’s Shepherd’s Bush showdown, the aim of which was to promote their new album, Sainthood.  The night was cold, the air was thick, and I recognised about a third of the audience from Gaydar.

The unmistakable sound of women swooning filled the venue and, confusingly, this didn’t stop entirely when Astronautlis (who is, I am pretty sure, a biological male) took to the stage to belt out a series of rather fine pop songs.  As my friend noted, his sound had an inimitable Tom-Waits-does-Buck 65 feel to it.  And despite that lazy NME-like reference, he really was a joy to watch, all snake hips and seizure-like stage antics.

When the twins finally took to the stage, the audience were remarkably English in their reception. No hysterical fans clambered the barriers and tried to bite Sara’s ankles or anything.  This is probably down to the fact that T+ S have presence.  It’s a rare thing, that.  The set began with a blazing rendition of ‘The Con’, and by the end of their third song, the whole front row seemed to be transfixed, only breaking their stances to occasionally wipe the saliva falling from their open mouths.  Sonically, the girls filled the venue 10 times over, creating the sort of noise you’d expect from a stadium rock band, not two polite Candians with acoustic guitars.

The sound was very, very good.  Despite the size of the place, things never got boomy as they do in a lot of big venues, and the live arrangements really take the metronomic minimalism of T+S’s sound to a new, much more lush place.

We were warned, midway, that we were now going to be exposed to the ‘New Material’ section of the set and if anyone wanted to “go get a beer”, this was probably the time to do so.  Luckily, Tegan and Sara’s recent release is filled with their usual brand of innovative, heart-felt tunage, and seeing the new stuff live only made me fall more in love with it.  ‘Hell’, their new single, was a real highlight – a song that is, at it’s core, one big instruction to dance.  Even the front row mannequins took a break from shock and awe to cut a rug.

But don’t worry.  Veteran fans would not have been disappointed.  The likes of ‘Where Does the Good Go’, ‘Speak Slow’ and ‘Living Room’ were attacked with lioness ferocity.  Smug smiles were shared between the true Old Skool-ers.

The set moved fast and the twins kept the dead air alive with some serious banter (at one point confirming my theory that 90% of lesbians did Karate when they were teenagers), so by the end  I was genuinely gutted that they were leaving.  The girls ended the set with a quiet acoustic version of their lovelorn anthem ‘Call It Off’, sending their audience off into the night, lulled by lullaby.

If you haven’t been lucky enough to catch T+S before, I urge you to grab a ticket next time they come around.  On stage, they break free from the reins of rigidity and compression which are sometimes pulled a little too tight on their recordings, and truly let their material fly.  I enjoyed myself thoroughly.