The best surprise about Sunday’s Tegan and Sara show wasn’t their dynamic new album, which they played in its entirety. It was, quite frankly, that these girls are the funniest lesbians since Ellen.
The night was a Tegan and Sara concert squeezed into Tegan and Sara’s Def Comedy Jam. They poked fun at each other, the audience, our song suggestions and even America – sometimes all in one go.
“We’ll play “Here I Am” when you all have healthcare in your country,” they said after someone called out a request.
But before the laughs and jams could get started, we were primed with the drearily slow opener, Laura Veirs.
A granola girl from Portland, Veirs is another dowdy indie songstress who belongs buried deep in a long music segment of “Prairie Home Companion.”
Even with contrived lyrics like “slain by your zirconium smile,” Veirs’ tunes were drab, generic and about as stimulating as a glass of tepid soymilk.
To make matters worse, in lieu of an actual band, Veirs had a local man strumming a guitar and going “buh-pah” into the microphone. Looks like someone saw the closing scene to “Juno” one too many times.
On to better things.
Black-clad and nymph-like, Tegan and Sara strutted onto stage with a huge presence and even bigger voices.
They kicked things off with old favorites like “Walking with a Ghost,” in which their mesmerizing harmony is punctuated by Sara’s distinctive boyish bellows.
They announced they were going to play their entire new album, Sainthood, which comes out on Tuesday.
“And I don’t care if you like it, but you have to pretend that you do,” Sara said.
No pretending necessary.
This band makes me wonder why there aren’t more female duos out there.
Their melodies are catchy and their lyrics, while deep, are digestible (no zirconium smiles here). And they’re multifaceted, with both women playing keyboards, guitar and occasionally manning the synthesizer.
But what really sets them apart is the cool mix of vocal arrangements that their two voices can generate. Sara’s vowel-distorting edge is the perfect complement to Tegan’s crooning, and, when they sing together, the effect is haunting and robust.
Tegan and Sara Quin are identical twin sisters who have been unstoppable since 1998, when they won a Battle of the Bands competition in their native Calgary. Since then, they’ve released six albums together, with guest performers from Death Cab for Cutie and AFI.
But that doesn’t mean they take themselves seriously.
“Don’t fuck up my songs by dancing all weird,” Sara said to Tegan at one point.
They told awkward stories about their awkward upbringing in Canada, like the time Sara got high before watching a live performance of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” with her mother. “Burning oot” is now my new favorite stoner phrase.
They also disdained the fact that critics call them a “folk band,” and the new album certainly dispels that notion.
Tinged with industrial grunge rock and a touch of 80s power-ballad, many of the new tracks are a complete departure from past material. Some of them were closer to hair metal than what anyone would call “folk.”
But others, like “Hell,” sound more like ramped-up versions of their past hits, spiky as the hair on the girls’ heads.
The last song from the new album, “Someday,” was a solid finish, a satisfying mix of a rapid-fire rhythm and a sunny message.
Then in the “encore” (the pair don’t believe in encores, so instead they just talk through the part where everyone claps and pleads for them to come back onstage), they played what Tegan said was “the song we had all been waiting for” – “Living Room.”
The crowd erupted in cheers, standing up in the oppressively austere Orpheum and dancing in their folding seats.
When it was all over, Tegan said, “It just flew by, didn’t it?”