If you show you show, if you go you go

One of my favorite MCs, rapper Jean Grae, once summarized the state of music best when she said, simply, "don't download the record". That came to my mind this morning as I heard Tegan and Sara's 2007 album The Con in its fully-mastered entirety for the first time ever. I'd been having a discussion with new soldout writer Liz at the Amanda Palmer show about the new Tegan and Sara record, which a simple scroll through this site will reveal that I am completely over the moon for. "The Con," Liz kept repeating, "The Con."

My memories of The Con consisted, until this very morning, of a low-quality, muddled, 9-track burned copy playing in my car stereo while a girl I was far too obsessed with talked over it. Not, per the version I'd grabbed from Soulseek, that there was anything to be missed.

I was wrong, I learned on the N train into Manhattan this morning.

Tegan and Sara, "Are You Ten Years Ago?"

The Con is a textural wonderland, a fucking masterpiece of drugs and darkness and heartbreak that, due to whatever leaked form I based my experience of the album on, I never gave a proper chance. Songs like "Like O, Like H" leave me feeling stupid and shaky, unable to stand properly, and "Are You Ten Years Ago?"... Hands down this was the song that left the biggest impression on me from the shitty pre-release copy of The Con I pirated two years back, but in this form it's a show-stopper, entirely.

I'm left unsure as to how to approach Sainthood now-can I really say it is Tegan and Sara at their loudest, darkest, most raw, when in fact all of those things describe The Con (and, frighteningly, the relationship I was in at the time I first heard it)?

In the words of Amy Sedaris: quandry. It's highly likely at this point that, in my top albums of 2009 list, there'll be a little darkhorse from 2007 sneaking her way in.