Metric Live @ The Mod Club - 4/14/09 + Fantasies Review

I have to send out a huge, heartfelt thank-you to 102.1 The Edge, a modern rock station based in Toronto, Canada. They provided me with free tickets to see my all time favourite band, Metric, at The Mod Club last night.

They say that the best place to see this band perform is inside a club, where the performance is more intimate and audience-focused. I would have to agree. The band's trademark energy was in full appearance during this show, and the crowd was absolutely wild.

Holy Fuck played from about 8:15pm for about 45 minutes. After 20 minutes of audience frustration building due to technical problems (the keyboards weren't working), Emily Haines and Co. took the stage, and the audience went crazy.

They opened up with a performance of Twilight Galaxy, a song that is considered controversial amongst Metric fans.This particular audience adored it, however. I've warmed up considerably to the now mandatory breakdown at the end of the song. Rarely have I ever been inspired to dance so wildly.

The band followed that up with equally exciting performances of hit single Help I'm Alive, the one song on Fantasies I don't care for, Satellite Mind, and Live It Out favourite Handshakes. Oddly absent was the definitive Metric track, Combat Baby. Every song on Fantasies got its time under the Mod Club lights, save for Blindness.

Metric encored with 2005 hit Monster Hospital (feet left the floor), and the arbitrary sing-a-long version of Live It Out, which had the entire club on the floor shouting along the lyrics while Emily stroked a pair of cougar statues...




Emily waves the tambourine to "Help I'm Alive"


"I dont' need your fuckin' Sympathy, but I'll play the song anyway!"



Can't have a band without the bass player [and the drummer]!
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METRIC
FANTASIES
Copyright 2009 Metric Productions under exclusive license to Last Gang Records

Indie Days Rating --> 4/5

The Good: Good balance of musical types; Metric sound not compromised; Surprisingly deep writing; Vocal range much greater; Sounds more like a "band-effort" than previous albums; Lots of potential hits

The Bad: Some of the lyrics are cringe-worthy; Teeters on the brink of over-production; Sounds as though Metric is fishing for mainstream attention

It has been a long, long time. Four years to be exact. Sure, 2007 saw the release of Grow Up and Blow Away, but that had been recorded years back.

Enter 2009, and Metric has made a triumphant return with the first new album since 2005's Live It Out. And it's clear, even to anyone who hasn't been following this album since its 2007 announcement, that so much more effort went into this baby. Okay, so maybe effort is the wrong word. Let's say the band had much more at their disposal to work with for this record.

Fantasies worked its way through seven different studios, with mixing by Grammy award-winning producer John O'Mahony (who most recently mixed the smash Coldplay album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends). The production is much, much bigger, and the band decided to forgo the record labels (except for in Canada and Mexico) and release it independently.

But was all of this really for the better of the album? The answer is, well, yes! Sure, longtime Metric fans may be turned off by the higher production values and the focus on hooky potential hits (Help I'm Alive, Sick Muse, Gimme Sympathy), that are just begging for radio airplay, but every fan will find something to love on Fantasies.

Overall, the album does shine, very, very bright. Despite the bigger production, that Metric sound is very much still here, albeit with a shiny coat of high-gloss paint. It is more refined, more polished, and a hell of a lot of fun to hear. Stadium Love is definitely meant for the stage, and it will be joined comfortably by the oddly un-Metric sounding Front Row and potential smash Sick Muse.

But the bulb on the album's cover burns brightest when the lights are turned down. Twilight Galaxy, Blindess, and Collect Call can still cause rump-shaking action at shows even though the songs themselves are more subdued and quiet.

Frontwoman Emily Haines that the writing on Fantasies is the simplest she has ever done, and for the most part, yes that's true. Help I'm Alive's ABCBCA routine is kind of a head-scratcher, and standout track Twilight Galaxy contains a lyric that will send groans all around ("I'm higher than high / Lower than deep"). Simple though it may be, the writing is just as clever and referential as it will ever be. The age old question "Who would you rather be / The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?", flows perfectly on the poppy Gimme Sympathy, and the lyrics of Blindness are especially moving.

Great though Fantasies is, it's not without its problems. The production that I've driveled on about in this review walks the dangerously thin line between "strong" and "way too fucking much". Satellite Mind is an example of that line. As is usual with Metric, the songs will hold up live based purely on the band's insane energy, but fresh-eared listeners may notice the ups and downs.

Fantasies signifies an explosive return for the little indie-rock band with the sexy frontwoman that could. It's by no means perfect, but I don't think it is so far-fetched the call it the best Metric album to date.

To anyone who is reading this, here is a question: How many people do you think will cry "sell-outs" when this album hits the Billboard 200?

Fantasies Track Listing [* indicates Indie Days fav]
1. "Help I'm Alive"
2. "Sick Muse"*
3. "Satellite Mind"
4. "Twilight Galaxy"*
5. "Gold Guns Girls"
6. "Gimme Sympathy"*
7. "Collect Call"*
8. "Front Row"
9. "Blindness"*
10. "Stadium Love"

What Defines the Indie Genre?

It's the first Friday of  a four day long weekend. The sweet tunes of Metric are playing in my ears, with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Stars, Broken Social Scene, Holy Fuck, The Weakerthans to follow. It's been a relatively nice day compared to the relatively freezing last few days, but it's starting to get chilly, and I long for the coat that's buried under a series of backpacks in the trunk of the four-by-four I'm writing this in.

Myself, my cousin, and my two younger siblings are about an hour into a 15 hour drive to the heart of French Canada, Quebec City. After getting from Brantford to the Hamilton airport, we had to turn around for arbitrary reasons, only to find out right when we got back into town that those arbitrary reasons had quickly become irrelevant.

As the lovely voice of Emily Haines on "Twilight Galaxy" soothe the slight frustrations I've been feeling (while everybody else chills out to Pussycat Dolls), I have a lot of time to reflect on the genre that I've made myself infatuated with over the past couple of years: indie. 

For a long time, when people thought indie, they thought soley this: a musician or band not tied to a record label. In other words, all it meant was: independent.

With the rock revolution of the early 2000's brought about by The Strokes, the meaning of the word has changed significantly. Sure, they are now many artists who don't toil under the commands of record execs, and technically they're still independent, but the style of indie rock and indie pop has evolved enough to become not only its own genre, but its own culture. As with every culture, it has its extremists. Indie kids their extremists as: hipsters. 

I love to hate the goddamn hipsters. Jeph Jacques, writer of the infamous online comic Questionable Content came up with a delightful tidbit about hipsters he calls, "The Theory of Hipster Relativity". The theory states (and this is quite true), that because hipsters believe that the quality of a musician is dependent on how obscure they are to the public, theoretically, the best band in the world would be the one that absolutely no one has heard of. Therefore, if no one has heard of them, they don't exist.

Hipsters suck, plain and simple. Indie cred, by association, is ludicrous. They think it makes them sound smarter, just because they can name a band that make chart-lurkers scratch their heads in confusion? Hedley? Hell no, I listen to Dead Child Star. Nickelback? Please, Sufan Stevens is where its at!

Hipsters are what define the indie subculture. As such, all indie kids are associated with hipsters. This is not a fair comparison. Why should anyone's musical tastes be based upon the credibility of the band's obscurity? They are ruining our subculture, one chart-bottoming "sell-out" at a time.

Just so you know, the new album from Metric, Fantasies, came out this past Tuesday. GO BUY IT!!! I don't care how shameless I'm being in my promotion of this band, they're awesome. Natch.