Album: Metric / Fantasies

Artist: Metric

Album: Fantasies

Metric has always been a band where, from the outset, my idea of them never lived up to the reality of their albums. Each of them had good singles and were generally okay, but still...

So it was an utterly delightful surprise put this one in, and then just feel compelled to keep playing it over and over. Head-and-shoulders this is their best album yet, though I'm at a loss to say they're doing anything radically different. I stuck to this disc for days, trying to puzzle out what went so gloriously right, but am ultimately without much in the way of insight, besides hoary old standbys like "consistency". This album starts out with four gems and hardly lets up from there.

Or perhaps it's just the band is working right in their comfort zone, musically taut and lyrically inhabiting a self-aware terrain throughout. "Twilight Galaxy" reads like an Emily Haines poster come to life, a savvy rockstar older sister dispensing advice ("keep doing it wrong") directly to the teenagers, while "Blindness" has a sublime warmth that recalls Hines' excellent solo Knives Don't Have Your Back, but more like an extroverted flipside of the coin to that disc. That outward-lookingness is pushed to its maximal conclusion on closer "Stadium Love". It's a bit sad an album like this could well push Metric into those stadiums, and out of my orbit, but with something this good, they well deserve as much success as they can grasp.

Track Picks : 2 - "Sick Muse", 3 - "Satellite Mind", 9 - "Blindness"