Album Review: Hey, I'm Just Like You by Tegan and Sara

Two decades on from debut album 'Under Feet Like Ours', Tegan and Sara dove deep for ninth full-length 'Hey, I'm Just Like You'. Taking its beginnings from the discovery of long-lost demo cassettes, the pair reworked tracks written when they were teenagers. It makes for a welcome blend of candid lyrics and mature musicality, all expertly held together by upbeat, contemporary production.

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When Tegan and Sara began working on a memoir detailing their teenage years, they came across a stash of demo tapes the duo had recorded during that tumultuous time. The songs dealt with heartbreak, identity issues, and growing up, and when they listened back to them, it was clear that quite a few of the songs deserved to be heard. After choosing their favorites, they hired producer Alex Hope to help them bring the songs back to life in a more modern fashion on Hey, I'm Just Like You.

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The Canadian duo have dusted off demos written when they were in High School, reworking the tracks and imbuing them with huge emotional heft It’s a bold move for any artist to dig up a bunch of old songs they wrote during high school . When Tegan and Sara revisited their cassette demos from the ’90s, they worried that their earliest material might suck (as anyone who has ever unearthed their previous fashion choices from Bebo understand). But Tegan and Sara Quinn have always had flair; they’ve reimagined their adolescent demos as swaggering indie-pop songs - and there was plenty to work with.

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In 1998, Tegan and Sara caused a small stir when they won a Calgary, Alberta talent contest called Garage Warz. The identical twins appeared on a local news segment to talk excitedly about their win, draped in capacious clothing and distinguishable by Sara's long hair and Tegan's lip piercing. "The thing that I like the best," said Sara, "is that, I don't think that [the judges] think, 'Wow, they're perfect, they [need] no improvement'...

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While compiling research for their new memoir, High School, Tegan and Sara found cassette tapes of songs they wrote and recorded between the ages of 15 and 17. These tracks are the foundation of their 20-year career and, together with their memoir, help to tell the origin story of this trailblazing act.   Tegan and Sara reworked these raw tracks for their ninth album, Hey, I'm Just Like You. They cut and pasted sections of the original songs, added a few lyrics, and, surrounded by an all-female band and production team (a first for a ….

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W ith Hey, I'm Just Like You, Canadian twins Tegan and Sara Quin have cultivated a fresh start. After morphing from indie-punk outcasts into purveyors of sugar-rush pop beloved of Taylor Swift on 2013's excellent Heartthrob, they hit a wall on its follow-up, Love You to Death. A commercial flop, it felt like a box-ticking exercise, with the band's spirit lost under the sheen.

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A s tracklists go, you don't get much more evocative than the one attached to Tegan and Sara's ninth album, a series of furiously indignant, laughably melodramatic and stomach-churningly poignant missives from the standard-issue internal monologue of the unhappy teenager. It's tempting to leave the likes of Hold My Breath Until I Die and Don't Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie) as song titles alone, imagining the contents to fit your own heady nostalgia trip. But if you do decide to dive in, you'll discover plenty more painfully perfect evocations of adolescent angst inside.

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