Metric

Fantasies

[4/5]

Metric are one of those bands who never seem to go wrong. A few of their songs may be dismissible or lackluster, but it’s easy to agree that each album they release is well-crafted and undeniably likeable. The majority of the adoration has been heaped on 2003’s Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, a collection of new-wave tracks often celebrated by hipster-club DJs. Six years later, though, the band have outdone themselves. Fantasies flows seamlessly from song to engaging song, with less focus on the dance-based instrumentals of Old World and greater attention on frontwoman Emily Haines’ thoughtful lyrics and lilting voice. “Help I’m Alive” is a propulsive and hooky first single, while the prancing, tongue-in-cheek “Gimme Sympathy” asks, “Who’d you rather be?/The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” The disc occasionally lags in momentum (“Twilight Galaxy” is not Metric’s finest five minutes), but it ultimately becomes one of the better pieces in their catalog-not just because it’s a good album, but because it’s a layering of everything Metric have created in the past with a sense of immediate passion. (METRIC MUSIC; ilovemetric.com) Emily Zemler



ROCKS LIKE:

Stars’ Set Yourself On Fire

Rilo Kiley’s Under The Black Light

MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular



IN-STORE SESSION WITH FRONTWOMAN EMILY HAINES



Do the songs on this album tell a story?

Definitely. I’m really not trying to be cryptic with it. In fact, I’m trying to be articulate. The concept that emerged during the making of Fantasies is a sense of all these places-sometimes they’re mishaps, sometimes they’re adventures-that you can go and find yourself ending up because of your own vision of reality and then how that can conflict with and be in contrast with so many other people’s realities. That wasn’t even a real sentence. You can consider that an expressionistic poem and kind of get what I’m saying. It’s certainly not a linear story, but it’s an imaginative story.



When you write music, do you know whether a song will be a Metric song or an Emily Haines song?

Not at all. It’s a really interesting process for me as a writer because the songs kind of dictate their own character. With this record, we spent a lot of time writing-not a lot of time in the studio, in fact, but a lot of time writing, in Seattle, in Buenos Aires, in [guitarist] Jimmy [Shaw’s] studio in Toronto. It was down to the last minute what direction the songs would go and which ones would belong. We probably did 15 songs that didn’t make it on this record, [but] that I loved and may have other lives on other records.



How does it feel to hold onto that many finished songs and not release them?

It’s good, actually, because I think that’s what we felt was good about taking a little more time. To just let the process unfold and not feel we had to grab the first thing we had and get it out there. We did want to push ourselves as musicians in new directions and realize that there’s time. [We wanted] to let this one have a cohesive feeling over a longer period of time instead of writing it in one month.



Do you think the fact that the songs on this album are meant to correlate with one another conflicts with how frequently people download songs individually these days?

It’s inevitable. I do that with music all the time. You hear one song by somebody and you like what they’re doing and then you get the whole record. It also has to do with the kind of band you are. I think people know us to be a band who make records. I’m not offended if someone downloads a couple tunes, but sometimes you need the whole thing if you really want to understand it and get it. But I’m not too concerned one way or another. [EZ]