The Singles Jukebox

The higher score out of our two sets of twins today…

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[7.33]

Natasha Genet Avery: Tegan and Sara craft a narrative that could just as easily be read as a love song describing a couple that doesn’t crave societal approval or a breakup song portraying a couple that has reached an impasse. The delicacy of the verses and the exceedingly danceable choruses make a pretty compelling case for the love song. As for the breakup version, as much as I wanted to snap my heart out at “we don’t need a white wedding,” I wondered: what if that’s what your partner wants and needs now that marriage is an option? Who should be the one to compromise? While the pulsing bridge of “keep! your! name! keep! your! faith” initially seems victorious (what if no one had to compromise?), building to a percussion-free climactic moment of “you can keep it all” sounds like the beginning of the end of a relationship. And the ominous repetition of “all the girls I loved before” suggests that Sara’s historically been unwilling to budge. I didn’t know that I needed a song to deal with queer matrimonial anxiety, but “BWU” really hits the spot.
[8]

Katie Gill: Perfectly wonderful synthpop. It’s cute and light and poppy and downright adorable. The chorus is infectious and the bubbly synths prop up the song to new bouncy heights. I’m always so pumped when I hear happy queer original work and Tegan and Sara deliver. Confession though? The high score might also be partly because I’m still jonesing on the glory and perfection of “100x.“
[9]

Alfred Soto: It’s foolish to praise the hooks; it’s like praising a faucet for pouring water. But water gets boring if that’s all you drink. If it’s all you know, life is a dull affair. Rewriting Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” with an early Depeche Mode preset, “BWU” contains granular-sized pathos. After all, this album’s been on sale at Target for six weeks.
[6]

Peter Ryan: This is stamped with a forthright possessiveness that recurs throughout Love You to Death, full of impassioned imperatives (“save your first and last…”) and declarations that presume reciprocation (“I don’t need a ring to prove that you’re worthy”) — it’s a quality that their recent works have brought into clearer focus; it was there on Heartthrob, albeit choked by doubt and manifesting as glorious flailing, and even in “Boyfriend,” where they muffled it for narrative’s sake. On “BWU” the Quins imbue this brashness with quiet confidence, all the better to subsequently suggest the smashing of marriage (and also maybe plant a flag for polyamory — “you can keep your dates”?). In lesser hands this material might get over-intellectualized and under-emoted, but the song’s secret is that it keeps all the coiled nerves of a proposal even while jettisoning the institution, that the feels don’t get lost in politics or pandering, that it can Do Both: lay a commitment-phobe’s sincere overtures atop ghostly-hushed choral pads in one breath, and bluntly reassert their queerness, and their defiance of the new queer norm, over a laser show chorus in the next. Three years after they promised never to walk the party line, they’re still making good.
[9]

William John: In my home country, same-sex couples still cannot get married. Following a recent federal election, the governing party now has a mandate to run a potentially non-binding, costly plebisicite to determine whether changes to marriage legislation should occur. In the lead up to the vote, I envision the amplification of many bigoted voices, who will tell me that LGBTQI people aren’t to be trusted when raising children, and that marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals because “that’s just the way things are and have always been.”  The entire process will be extremely unpleasant and I wish it could be resolved more expediently, because there are so many other queer issues that deserve to be foregrounded in the same way – blood donation discrimination, funding for queer health, discrimination in the workplace, anti-bullying programs aimed at trans teens in schools, et cetera. I don’t know whether the Quin twins are mounting a subtle protest against marriage being the only queer rights issue apparently worthy of any attention, or whether the sentiment in “BWU” is borne out of a repulsion towards marriage as an institution which has traditionally disenfranchised women, or if they just want everyone to know how truly grotesque weddings can be. Whichever is the case, their expressive, poetic delivery is proof that there’s nothing unromantic about being anti-marriage.
[8]

Will Adams: With each single, with each clean-cut Kurstin production, I become more convinced that my numbness to Love You to Death in contrast to Heartthrob is not simply a result of the former being less immediate or punchy. There are only so many times you can hit the same bullseye.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: First impressions on the verses: “I don’t need a lock to prove that you trust me, I walk the walk” — gosh, another thoughtful Tegan and Sara relationship song, they’re damned good at this stuff. Then the chorus makes me feel like their ideas get a bit clumsier as they get bigger, and if that’s not the case then certainly their melodies do here — Greg Kurstin’s never been as consistent as successful. Sara Quin once sang backing vocals on a Dragonette song, and here she sounds like a less good Dragonette. The definitive text on rejection of marriage as the ne plus ultra of queer love remains The Hidden Cameras’.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Though I side with it, it’s not the song’s anti-marriage stance that I feel for but its other main point: “I walk the walk just to be with you.” Sara doesn’t put a ring on it not because she can’t commit but with a love so simply expressed, does it really need anything more? She makes the bond with her partner sound so pure, with the  light pulse of a synth providing a just-right kind of comfort, like an arm over a shoulder. It’s not underachieving, just down to earth and sure of what she wants — or what she doesn’t want.
[8]

Lauren Gilbert: This gives me Queerness Feels, even more than “Boyfriend.” Being queer, to me, has always been about more than just being attracted to the same gender; it’s about not fitting into heteronormative expectations. So acquiring the right to marry doesn’t mean that you just slot in marriage and 2.5 kids and a white picket fence; queerness means that without a societal template to fall back onto one is forced to truly consider what matters how you want to conduct your relationships. Which is all a bit beside the point, as all that doesn’t say anything about the actual song. Sonically, I think it feels like a bit of a retread of other songs of the album, and considering it on those merits alone, it’s nothing to write home about.  Instead, I end up not really listening to it as music and instead thinking about the political implications of being queer, and what marriage means to me.
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