Tegan and Sara

A while back I received as a gift a CD compilation of songs that Little Steven Van Zandt considers "cool." The one that really grabbed me was "Walking With a Ghost," by Tegan and Sara. In fact, I have on numerous occasions put it into the stereo and hit the repeat button, it's that good a song.

Tegan and Sara had been on my radar, on the extreme periphery. I guess I knew they were twin sisters, but for some reason I figured they must be some kind of coffeehouse folk act (which is not a put-down, I like coffeehouse folk). Instead they are, well, hard to categorize. It's power-pop, I guess, with a hint of something else, like an unidentifiable spice in a savory dish. Buoyed by the Ghost song, I purchased their album from last year called The Con. It's intriguing, challenging and finger-snappingly good.

The whole thing is packaged as if it is a novel, with the cover looking like parchment paper and the tracks labeled as chapters. Even so, it doesn't come off as the pretentious doodlings of English majors. The opening song, "I Was Married," starts things off sunnily: "I married in the sun. Against the stone of buildings built before you and I were born." From there, though, things spiral downwardly, as each succeeding song deals with some sort of heartbreak and despair. It's like listening to someone talk to an ex-lover on their cell-phone, as we get one side of the conversation.

My favorite songs are "Relief Next to Me," the title song (the words "The Con" are never mentioned--should we assume that the con is the emotion of love itself?), and "Back in Your Head," which has a deliriously infectious hook plinked on the piano. It contains the marvelous lines, "Remember when I was so strange and likable?...Remember when I was sweet and unexplainable?" There's also an eerie and moving song cryptically titled "Like O, Like h."

By the end of the record you are bound to feel moved, hopefully not to slit your wrists. The last two songs are "Dark Come Soon": "Dark you can't come soon enough for me. Saved from more day of misery," and the bluntly titled "Call It Off": "Maybe I would would have been something you'd be good at. Maybe you would have been something I'd be good at. But now we'll never know."