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 Local band, Metric, have a brand new album out. The quartet plays the Phoenix nightclub tomorrow and Thursday. |
There aren't many bands that straddle guitar-rock and synth-pop as successfully as Metric does. In fact, over the past year the locally-bred quartet seems to have found the ideal formula for translating off-kilter indie rock into mainstream success. Their 2003 debut, Old World Underground Where Are You Now, spawned a couple of actual radio hits and numerous sold-out shows.
And for their brand-new followup, Live It Out, they've taken things to a whole new level. It's at once more polished, more intense and more solid, with bigger guitar riffs, catchier tunes and sharper lyrical observations.
Singer-keyboardist-lyricist Emily Haines says that's a result of the band's determination to be true to themselves and do things their way.
"We wanted to capture what we really sound like as a band, and I think that's what we got," she said in a recent phone interview. "It was like looking in a mirror for the first time, 'cause we'd never had a chance to record ourselves the way we think things sound good."
That meant Haines and guitarist-producer James Shaw recording Live It Out in their Toronto apartment, with periodic visits from Oakland-based bassist Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key.
"Josh and Joules would come out and we'd all get the song up and feeling good, and we'd record them," Haines explained. "Then they'd leave and James and I would record our stuff, then they'd come back and we'd all kind of put the finishing touches on it. It worked really well breaking it up that way. And our reactions to whether something was good or bad were pretty much unanimous."
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Even more than the band's signature musical synthesis, Metric stands apart for Haines' dark, paranoid lyrics, which comment on sexuality, the workplace ("Buy this car to drive to work/ Drive to work to pay for this car") and a band's place in the culture at large.
"That's like a white elephant in music -- people are writing about everything but what's going on in their lives," she said. "I don't know what to make of that. The larger awareness seems to be anti-commerce, like you're not supposed to know what's going on, you're supposed to just be a player."
Haines, who's a charismatic live wire of a frontwoman, said the band was keenly aware of how the songs would work in concert when they made Live It Out.
"On the previous record, there was more of a clear divide between the recorded version and the live version," she said. "I think one of the things we wanted to accomplish on this record was to narrow the gap between the two.
"We were aware that we were going to be playing the music live -- that's what we always return to. Rather than getting into all these ideas about who's going to like this and what's happening in music, I just focus on whether I'm going to feel good standing there, saying this hundreds of times, and whether it will fit with the music we've written so far.
"And it's been really great so far, 'cause it flows very well together."
Metric play the Phoenix tomorrow and Thursday.