Tegan and Sara

The whole girl-with-a-guitar genre is like your first "A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle" bumper sticker: Its overt earnestness is initially very empowering and, subsequently, extremely embarrassing, once you've moved out of the dorm and into the messy, "post-feminist" world full of things like strap-ons and Peaches (wait -- is that redundant?).

So Jealous, the third album from twin Canadian girls-with-guitars Tegan and Sara, epitomizes coming to terms with that shift in perspective. Their 2000 LP, This Business of Art, was all coffee-shop confessionals for the baby-dyke set, while 2003's If It Was You was a sort of indie-rock rebellion against the DiFranco aesthetic.

On So Jealous, the sisters' brittle little voices process relationships over catchy hooks and garage-rock grinding. The album is about finding a balance between the fervent girl power of one's youth and the tempering of that ardor by the big, bad world -- and ending up with a well-rounded, grown-up, and ultimately, pretty damn likable sound in the process.