For those with a vested interest in the bland and banal, I present a new album to limply poke your beige taste buds, namely Tegan and Sara’s release “Heartthrob”. As a twin myself I feel the need to stick up for other geminals across the globe, but as the album progresses imperceptibly through bubble-gummy synthesized pop trash I begin to feel more and more betrayed. By the time ‘How Come You Don’t Want Me?’ kicks in I have several unmentionable answers to that pseudo-insightful question.

The track ‘Love they Say’ could be mistaken for a Taylor Swift  B-side, but at least Taylor has the good sense to promote herself as a pop star and not as an ‘indie-pop’ icon. “No one will confuse this with any of our other records” claims Sara in interview, arguably because no one could mistake it for anything more enjoyable than purposefully dragging cutlery across a dinner plate. ‘Shock To Your System’ is quite the opposite, invoking nothing more than an overwhelming sense of relief at the long-awaited end to this assault on ears and will to live alike.

This album is a great shame. Tegan and Sara used to produce inoffensive saccharine lite-folk, gorged on by teenagers country-wide; now they will undoubtedly join the playlists of ‘Beliebers’ desperate for more generic Capital FM pop slurry. Even the album sleeve attempts to capture some of their long-lost quirkiness, fake doodles and smouldering glances abound, which I assume was designed to provide small respite to those mourning the gradual demise of HMV.

2/10

Warner Bros.