"The Con" turns 10

In 2007, indie pop band (and twin sisters) Tegan and Sara (last name: Quin) released what remains their most ambitious album to date: an angsty masterpiece packed with therapy-worthy tell-alls. Yet the Quin sisters had already established themselves, particularly with 2004's "So Jealous," as creators of some of the best pop mash notes of the 21st century.

The emotional honesty of Tegan and Sara's songs often reaches high-school-diary proportions -- but, y'know, in a good way. The sisters care tremendously about the psychology and whirl of emotions that surround the experience of love, and more than that, of heartbreak. Their sweet-and-sour voices and harmonies suggest the pucker-inducing lemonhead that romantic love can be, all with a satisfyingly punkish, pugnacious edge. To say Tegan and Sara are unafraid to be vulnerable lyrically would be a massive understatement.

Some of that punkishness comes out in Ryan Adams' cover of "Back in Your Head," from "The Con X: Covers," in which artists like City and Colour, Hayley Williams, and CHVRCHES pay homage to "The Con." (I actually prefer Adams' version to the original.) Going in a totally different direction, CHVRCHES turns "Call It Off" -- one of the Quin sisters' simplest, saddest, and prettiest lost-love songs -- into an ethereal hymn, with dazzling results. It doesn't hurt that "Call It Off" includes some of Tegan and Sara's best lyrics, perfectly capturing the mourning and ambivalence that mark a tough breakup:

Call, break it off
Call, break my own heart
Maybe I would have been something you'd be good at
Maybe you would have been something I'd be good at

But now we'll never know
I won't be sad
But in case I go there
Everyday, to make myself feel bad
There's a chance that I'll start to wonder if this was the thing to do

Maybe "The Con" received as much acclaim as it did because it's a sprawling, conceptually rich album from a previously small-scale band. It's bigger in scope and length, and boasts more emotional depth, than any of Tegan and Sara's other records, before or since. For a taste of the psychological intensity on display, check out the title track's intervention-from-hell lyric: "Encircle me, I need to be taken down." Who hasn't needed a friend to steal their cellphone so they don't drunk-text their ex? Who hasn't needed a pep talk of Taylor Swiftian proportions to avoid idealizing a bad-news former lover? With masterly brevity, Tegan and Sara made "The Con" a compendium of romantic calamities. Better to have loved and lost? Easy for him to say.

Throughout its length, "The Con" alternates between quieter introspection (as in "Call It Off") and surging mini-epics that use turbulent drums, abrupt starts and stops, and vocals that veer thrillingly skyward or dizzyingly downward. And is there, in all of 21st-century indie pop, a better account of teen love and loss than "Nineteen"?

I felt you in my legs
Before I ever met you
And when I lay beside you
For the first time I told you
I feel you in my heart and I don't even know you
And now we're saying bye, bye, bye
And now we're saying bye, bye, bye

There's a reason we yearn to read other people's diaries. Even after a decade, "The Con" feels fresh and vital in its account of the raw, overwhelming emotions we feel before, during, and after a big, big love.