Third time the charm?
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[6.88]
Anthony Easton: What miracle made my favorite folk duo become one of my favorite dance bands? This glittering heartbreak fully shatters me because it is too spiky and angular to fully melt.
[8]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Technically buoyant yet wounded. Compact yet literally, utterly, sadly bereft of fascination. The drama/dullness quandary: yup, sounds like a Tegan & Sara song.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Mimicking the siren ringing in the girls’ heads, the synth adds the drama to a situation so common that it needed to be articulated: “You never ever saw me like they did.” After a year of releasing unassuming single after single, Tegan & Sara have moved heartbreak to its natural home as a mirror move dance in your living room, where your boyfriend never ever sees you like you do.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: “Goodbye.” “‘Goodbye’? I don’t wanna.” “I don’t wanna feel the need to hear your voice.” “Feel the need to hear your voice.” That is how you present internal conflict. There are so many possibilities in this song, some suggested intentionally, some perhaps not, but that’s what it’s all about: confliction, expressed as confused and irrational as it gets.
[8]
Juana Giaimo: Now that we’re used to the new Tegan and Sara, “Goodbye Goodbye” still sounds surprisingly fresh. Sara’s acknowledged highlight on the album was the incredibly emotional “How Come You Don’t Want Me” while Tegan was in charge of writing the big hit single “Closer“, but “Goodbye Goodbye” has the awkwardness that characterized Sara’s previous successful singles — think of “Alligator” and “Walking With a Ghost.” Her straightforwardness is shocking but still unforced, especially in the silly, catchy word-game in the chorus. “Goodbye Goodbye” probably won’t be as popular as “Closer,” but old fans who listen closely will find that familiar sound that many of us missed in Heartthrob.
[8]
Josh Langhoff: SPOILER ALERT: At the beginning of Mockingjay — which, OK, it’s not as good as the first two but Katniss’s character keeps getting better and better — Katniss is recovering from near death, she’s on drugs, she doesn’t know who she can trust or what she’s even supposed to be doing. As she drifts from moments of rock hard punkitude to noble tenderness to just hiding in the laundry, the doctors prescribe her a litany to help get a grip on reality: “start with the simplest things I know to be true” — name, age, home District, life events — “and work toward the more complicated.” Shellshocked by love, Tegan & Sara appear to have the same doctor. In “Goodbye, Goodbye” they repeat words and phrases until they become incantations. I don’t wanna, I might wanna, I can’t live with, you never really loved me never ever never really loved me loved me like they did… These are things they know to be true. These truths are their rope through the snowstorm or their weirdly tuned synth descant leading through the steely pop corridors. If they see the face of the beloved they gotta start all over again.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Congrats to Greg Kurstin, who Wikipedia says is responsible for those tasty guitar licks in one channel. Any louder and someone would probably call this disco, but on a record ravenous for hooks, what’s one more? Otherwise, it’s clipped, brittle synthpop: a fragile snowglobe of a breakup song.
[5]
Will Adams: An inauspicious choice of single, “Goodbye, Goodbye” delivers the ethos of Heartthrob neatly: glossy pop rock made even shinier with synth flourishes. There are emotions to be felt and hooks to be sunk, but it lacks the drive of its neighbors “Closer” and “I’m Not Your Hero.” In other words, it wears its third single status on its sleeve a bit too much.
[7]