Love You to Death
Tegan and Sara
Vapor/Warner Bros
Three stars
It’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the exact line where pop music crosses over into achieving credibility with sniffier music fans, but for more than 15 years and eight albums, Canadian twins Tegan and Sara have done a decent job of finding out.
Despite its potentially sociopathic title, much of Love You to Death focuses more closely on endearingly honest alternative takes on relationships.
There’s plenty of regret about their own failures, with a confessional tone, notably on 100x (“It was cruel of me to do what I did to you") and opener That Girl (“Nobody hurts you like me/ When did I become that girl?"). Boyfriend, meanwhile, is the most open distillation of the sisters’ lives, a clever love-song twist based on Sara’s real-life relationship.
For those only half-listening, it could all pass for throwaway pop. Take the slick chorus of White Knuckles, which has the bombast of a Spice Girls ballad. But when it evaporates into lovely little echoed harmonies, it’s clear that there’s more intelligence at work here, during a concise half-hour of shiny yet smart millennial pop.
![American law student Zein Jallád, 19, left, and Italian event manager Christin Zanon, 32, swap stories in The Conversation Chair, by The [Sameness] Project. Alex Atack for The National](http://web.archive.org./web/20160621142532im_/http://www.thenational.ae/storyimage/AB/20160619/ARTICLE/160618983/AR/0/AR-160618983.jpg&MaxW=145&imageVersion=default)
