Love You To Death

These are nuclear-grade pop hits that don't sacrifice on adult emotional complexity: a rare power. [Jul 2016, p.81]

At just over half an hour in length, this is a stunning song suite of positivity that leaves you yearning for thirty more equally superb minutes.

Love You To Death is an apt title for an album so full of effortlessly addicting pop that nonetheless exhausts a sole musical formula in every permutation.

Love You To Death is an album full of intelligent, sensitive pop songs, and at a time when the watermark for such music is pretty high anyway, it really does stand out from the crowd.

If you like your pop with a bit more bite to it, then Tegan and Sara are everything you’re looking for.

For now, Tegan and Sara have reached the end of a thorny, awkward path to pop perfection. Those years of uncertainty have only sweetened the realisation.

At times, the high-definition production sheen feels smothering, but overall this is a multilayered, emotionally engaging pop confection.

Like Heartthrob, this is pop music that is all heart all the time, and for that, the sisters deserve every accolade that comes their way.

The Quins’ voices give songs like “Faint of Heart” extra dramatic heft, while adding anxious shades to the steely-eyed façade of “Hang on to the Night.”

For all Tegan and Sara’s adoption by the queens of teen pop, Love You to Death feels like a distinctly grownup album, unafraid to explore nuanced, mature themes.

All over their eighth album, the Quins continue to demonstrate what makes them such fine songwriters.

Love You To Death is a really, really good pop record.

In comparison [to 2007’s The Con], Love You to Death can at times seem regressive, less poignant. For those who once looked to Tegan and Sara to help them navigate the bumpy roads of adult emotions, it’s a map for terrain they left in the dust a long time ago.

It's rare to find complex, personal songs about love and relationships matter-of-factly sung from a queer perspective, and in that respect alone Tegan and Sara remain a crucial voice in the pop landscape. Elsewhere on the album, things a just a little less distinct.

Love You to Death IS solid. In a way, it’s sort of like those now-cherished, then forgotten, 80s downtempo pop albums ala the first Human League and Modern English LPs.

The Quins bring pathos and depth to sleek Katy Perry/Lady Gaga-esque electropop, true, but reaching for the golden ring too often dilutes the inventiveness and creative abandon that once made a new T&S record such an exhilarating proposition. [No. 132, p.59]

Despite these obligatory comparisons to their 2013 effort, though, Love You to Death is ultimately its own beast, one that finds Tegan and Sara working effectively with confessional songwriting and further developing their enthusiasm for synthpop’s visceral pleasures.

The record does play a bit like a return trip through familiar terrain, but for the most part, Love You to Death finds Tegan and Sara offering another solid soundtrack for summer romances and road-trips alike.

The songs here don't quite hit the same level of high-gloss overdrive they managed last time out, a problem for a band that prizes songwriting over the kind of vocal gymnastics that can turn a so-so synth-pop tune into an uncorked geyser of catharsis (elsewhere the wan piano ballad "100x" shows their limitations as confessional quiet stormers).

Love You's sticky problem is the same one that plagues all but the Thriller/Purple Rain-iest of pop records, and it's that everything that comes between the hits sounds like filler in comparison.

When they stop aiming for catchiness and instead get real about relationships, LYTD sparkles.

Tegan and Sara colour inside the lines a little too much (Stop Desire and B/W/U are shiny, forgettable filler, and Hang On To The Night is a damp squib closer) for their latest to really zing.