Ryan's Tegan and Sara Review

Love stories are tricky, and telling them in song there’s no exception to that. Part of this stems from cynicism – there is a lot of film, music, and literature that go around calling themselves love stories, but they're really empty, and talk about what is at best a childish understanding of the emotions involved and at worst a form of emotional sociopathy. Take a look at the “romantic comedies” that fill up the movie theatres in the summer, or the “love songs” that fill up the Billboard charts and you get an idea of what I'm talking about. Part of it also stems from the fact that falling in love is a scary and dangerous thing. An author I like, Wil McCarthy, once compared love to gravity – a powerful force, but one that can destroy you if you're not careful around it.

Tegan and Sara Quin realize this about love, but they went and wrote an album about love anyways. Sainthood realizes the pitfalls of writing about love – as the ladies sing on Hell, “These words are over-used”, but that's the thing about love: the cliches don't matter anymore, and it doesn't matter that the fire will burn you if you get to close. You're in love, and you want to let the whole damn world know.

Now, once you've acknowledged that there's a lot of cliches out there about love, you become obligated to avoid those cliches, and Tegan and Sara do that well with this album by not only focusing on the positive rush of endorphines you get in that initial stage of immature love. Instead, they've crafted an album that covers the entire narrative arc of a relationship. The first stage of the album is the first three songs: Arrow, Don't Rush, and Hell, which look at the initial attraction and starting of a relationship, and the emotional roller-coasters that result from that. The next two songs look at the infatuation of the early stages of a relationship. The Cure marks a move away from this – there's a notable change in the narrative voice and in the subject matter of the lyrics, and you can tell that we're getting a more mature, understated view of love – one that's willing to sacrifice, and put the other person ahead of yourself.

Sadly, though, this is not one of those love stories that end happily; the last few tracks look at the end of a relationship, and they give the album a bit of a bittersweet aftertaste as a result. It's more sweet than bitter, though, and like the narrator of this love story, you feel like you've learned from the experience. Listening to albums all the way through, in the order the artist laid them out in, has fallen out of favour in the past decade, but this is one of those albums that demands it to get the full experience.

Love, and its joys and pitfalls, a lot for an album to take on, especially one that's as short as Sainthood is (the entire thing clocks in under 40 minutes). It's short in the same way that a Hemingway story's short, though – everything extra and unnecessary has been cut away, leaving only the beating heart of the story. And a damn well told story it was. There have been a lot of strong albums on this year's shortlist, but in this reviewer's opinion, at least, Sainthood stands head and shoulders above the rest of them.