At the start of 2007, Tegan and Sara Quin were at a pivotal point in their personal and professional lives. Their previous album, 2004’s So Jealous, had been their most successful to date. They were going into new recording sessions with the wind at their backs, and more control over their careers than ever before.

But on a personal level, the twins were in pain. Their grandmother, who they’d frequently described as a second mother, had just passed away. Tegan was bitterly mourning the end of a five-year relationship, and Sara was struggling to get her American-born partner a Canadian working visa so they could live together in Montreal.

On top of their individual emotional turmoil, their own fractious sibling relationship was becoming increasingly volatile. Amongst all this, they flew to Portland in January of 2007 to record what would become The Con. 

The Album

“There was blood all over that record,” Tegan once said of The Con — and she was right. At just 36 minutes long, The Con remains the most raw and brutal of the band’s career, detailing all corners of a relationship, from its tender highs (‘I Was Married’) to its painful lows (‘The Con’, ‘Nineteen’, ‘Call It Off’).

Musically, it caught the band in the transition from indie guitar duo to burgeoning pop machine. Within tracks like ‘Back In Your Head’ and ‘Burn Your Life Down’, you can hear the melodic seeds of the successful mainstream pop career they would go on to form.

They reached new heights as arrangers on songs like ‘Knife Going In’ and ‘Like O, Like H’, with their dizzying polyrhythms and jittery percussion, while Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla kept the production stark but intimate.

At the core of The Con are four songs: ‘Call It Off’, ‘Nineteen’, ‘The Con’ and ‘Back In Your Head.’ 10 years on, these songs are still arguably the band’s most beloved — it’s rare Tegan and Sara will play a set without including all of them.

The Reception

Despite the album’s strength, throughout the 2000s Tegan and Sara found themselves the focus of blatantly homophobic and sexist criticism.

It seems hard to believe now that only 13 years ago, NME could write in their review of So Jealous that Tegan and Sara were “Quite lovely, even if they do hate cock”. In their review of the same album, Spin called them a “Wicca folk nightmare.”

“Their music always came second to their identities”

Crazier still is that these references to their sexuality and gender were completely commonplace. If a review of the band didn’t mention that the duo were lesbians, it almost certainly mentioned they were identical twins, or called them a ‘female duo’. Their music always came second to their identities.

They still come up against now: “If you’re doing a feature on us, and you want to bring up our sexuality, that’s great,” Tegan told FasterLouder last year. “But maybe in the third or fourth line, maybe not in the headline, maybe not before our names. We’re a band, and we also happen to be gay.”

Upon its release in July, The Con definitely wasn’t immune from this treatment. Pitchfork infamously opened their review of the album with the line: “Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock, a comparison only fair because of the company they kept.” The company they kept? Because they are lesbians? Because they’re women? Because they make music and also happen to get periods? What the fuck are you talking about?

Rolling Stone went down a similar road, opening with this: “As lesbians who never reference their oppression or even their sexuality, Tegan and Sara don’t have men to lash out at, put up with or gripe about.” The publication then argues that the absence of male subject matter means that the band’s songs are “short on drama” — ludicrous sexism aside, it’s hard to believe anyone could listen to tracks like ‘Nineteen’ and accuse them of lacking dramatics.

Other reviews weren’t much better. NME called Tegan and Sara “twin airbags” and compared them to Kelly Clarkson, while Slant compared them to Avril Lavigne.

The Frustrating Result

Reading these reviews ten years later is a sobering experience.

At best, it’s a reminder of just how far we’ve come, and at worst, it forces the realisation that The Con never got the respect it actually deserved. By dismissing the Quins as a “lesbian band” or a “female band”, the press cheapened and pigeonholed one of the best records of the decade.

Ten years on, The Con deserves to be recognised.

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Jules LeFevre is Staff Writer at Music Junkee and inthemix. She is on Twitter.