During the 12th century, Europe’s most talented musicians would entertain nobles with songs of courtly love. These troubadours were famed for their razor wit and eloquence. Some eight centuries later, Canadian rockers Tegan & Sara evoke their memory at the Tivoli as they effortlessly weave personal anecdotes and sisterly verbal jousting through a captivating set poignant with love and loss.

First, though, the Tivoli’s penchant for odd starting times means this reviewer misses all but the final song of the divine Kaki King’s set. It’s doubly frustrating to later discover local indie rocker Kate Cooper put in a brief mid-set appearance. Still, a couple of minutes of King’s intricately layered guitar and seamless looping shows the “guitar god” tag is well deserved as she shines in solo mode. The rapturous applause she garners is no less than her due.

It’s just as well Tegan & Sara’s new album The Con is a corker, since it forms the backbone of their set. No less than seven new tunes open proceedings, and it’s a credit to the Canadian duo’s songcraft that this approach resonates so clearly. The opening notes of Dark Come Soon, title track The Con, Relief Next To Me and Burn Your Life Down and more are greeted with enthusiastic screams. But, time and again, when you might expect the crowd to erupt in song, they hush, listening in reverential near-silence.

In performance mode, Tegan’s vocals prove huskier than studio renditions and there’s an edgy rawness to the synth-guitar intertwinings and transitions, but it adds gritty punkish flavour – proving particularly effective on jagged numbers such as Like O Like H and, later, Knife Going In.

When they eventually delve into their 2004 breakthrough with the rapturously greeted Speak Slow and title track So Jealous, Sara begins to break up the set with her tales – and the ribbing starts. But where the audience would be the hecklers for many bands, here the enemy lies within.

As Sara relates an expensive adventure to Sydney’s trendy Minus Five bar, Tegan “Forty dollars entry? You could get a muffin and a juice here for that.” Quin uses the moral highground of non-attendance to get in some digs about dubious alcohol-influenced choices and take amusing potshots at Australia’s cost of living.

Sara resolutely maintains the waterfall – “Don’t drink it, it’s full of antifreeze” – was very cool, even if the concept of a bar chilled to minus five celsius is lame to Canadians, and truce of sorts is called as they launch into Floorplan.

The bar outing becomes the running battle of the evening. After another exchange, Sara mock-confides that her sister attacks when she “smells the weakness in other animals”, prompting Tegan to ask their father (who’s out in the audience) how it feels to have one overachieving daughter plus a weird martyr. Another truce, a brace of songs from If It Was You – including a lovely Kaki King-assisted rendition of Monday, Monday, Monday – and they’re at it again.

Tegan: “So you dropped $360 in 35 minutes?”
Sara: “You worked that out? You’re obnoxiously annoying.”

There’s a touch of the Doug Anthony All Stars to it all, but the humour and abuse is tightly restricted to between-songs banter; the lyrical content of this duo’s punk-pop synth-inflected tunes lean distinctly to heartache. And few could be more overt than the angst-filled Nineteen and set-closer Call It Off. The former is possibly the closest the Canadians get to an out-and-out rock song all night, while the latter shivers with relived emotion as Tegan loses herself in the lyrics.

The crowd’s whistles are deafening, and the pair dutifully return for an extended encore. They perform perennial favourite I Know, I Know, I Know alone, then the full band return to underpin a power-chord fuelled cover of Rhianna’s Umbrella. In some ways, the encore feels like a payoff for all the tracks from The Con, but as people go into meltdown as the twins finish with Living Room, I’m left with the certainty that the first was just as good as the last.