0.8.1 - Our common goal, was waiting for, the world to end
We played Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun (first edition) a whole bunch; and I owned both books, which came with extensive bibliographies of related media works the games had drawn on for inspiration. Neuromancer was at the top of both lists. I've always been a somewhat voracious reader, a habit I sometimes struggle nowadays to keep up with, going through bursts of reading and then stopping for months at a time. But before I had a computer in the palm of my hand and social media to stunt my attention span to the tiny nubbin it has become, when I wasn't listening to music, I was reading. I've probably read the books in the Sprawl trilogy ten plus times each, and just writing about it I'm getting the urge to go back to Neuromancer again.
Twenty years later, we have innumerable depictions of the kind of capitalist dystopia the cyberpunk genre encapsulates; high budget video games like Cyberpunk 2077 and lower budget but still excellent computer RPGs like Shadowrun:Hong Kong and Dues Ex:Mankind Divided; films from Blade Runner to Minority Report; anime, TV shows, and of course, our own ongoing slide into the reality of a corporate controlled capitalist wasteland, which I can assure you, is not as much fun as I hoped it might be back in the early 90s.
But when I think about the Cyberpunk genre, the works of William Gibson and my own mental images of shady bars and underground nightclubs filled with criminals and anarchists fighting back against corporate control for principal or profit, the music in my head that is playing in those bars is nearly always the music of Metric. It's synthetic, with dreamlike electronic beats, and a slight metallic echo layered across Emily Haines vocals, but it's uncompromising, relentless, an in-your-face drive of pounding drums and angular guitar riffs. The future may be a capitalist wasteland, but at least it's got a killer soundtrack.
I've been so lost in the incompleteness of my memory about how I ended up listening to Metric that I had to ask others for answers, and even now I'm not sure I have the whole story. I think the answer lies somewhere in a recommendation from a former friend (former because he was caught cheating on his girlfriend with another girl, there was a whole Dawson's Creek drama blow up about the whole thing, its not worth going into. One of only three people I've ever been in a real fistfight with.) who found them...somehow? He and I and my friend D were very into female-led alternative rock groups starting with our mutual enjoyment of Verruca Salt and The Breeders, and somehow I think Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? ended up on our friends radar. I am mostly certain that I owned copies of both that album and Live It Out, downloaded from shady torrent sites. My friend D also reminded me that the music video for Monster Hospital from the later of those two albums was a staple of late night MTV2 alternative rock music programming. No matter the origin, the core facts I am sure of are that somehow, I ended up on the ground floor of enjoying this very underground Canadian rock band in the early 2000s, and that in doing so, I began a double decade fascination with their lead singer.
Let's be clear - this isn't tawdry; I'm not sure a blog post which boils down to "I listened to ten albums by a band because I think their lead singer is a hottie" covers me in glory or says anything useful. There's a word I have heard the kids on the internet use, and I'm going to apply it here. Emily Haines has aura. My fascination with her is the deer's fascination with the headlights, the bird's fascination with the striking cobra. I never entertained fantasies of dating her, or meeting her - I'm sure she's a perfectly lovely person in real life - because the Emily Haines from Metric that exists in my head would be a dangerous and charismatic force that would utterly destroy everything in its wake.
I'm not the only one who feels that way, I know. If you've ever read Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim vs The World books, or seen the Edgar Wright movie adaptation, Emily Haines exists in those properties in her incarnation as Envy Adams, Scott's erstwhile ex. Metric were rising stars in the Toronto music scene while O'Malley was penning Scott Pilgrim, and he used concert photos of Metric as direct inspiration for the appearance of Envy on the page. And when Brie Larson was cast as Envy in the film adaptation, there's an interview with her that I can't seem to find online (or maybe I imagined it) where she said she watched concert footage of Emily performing in order to create her performance as Envy when she is onstage. I didn't know any of this when I started listening to Metric - I didn't read Scott Pilgrim until some time in the late 2010s, and didn't watch the film until during the Pandemic - but the vibes I felt back in the early 2000s seem, if not universal, then at least commonplace enough to have made it into a major motion picture*.
I mentioned before that we went to see them for the Formentera tour in 2023, and even playing in a packed but small students union in Manchester, her energy and performance pressed against the confining walls of the venue; by the end of the gig, the crowd bent to her every word. We would have run through brick walls at her command. That, for me, is why I find their music so compelling - the unique combination of how they sound, who they are, and how they make you feel.
I have a varied relationship with Metric's canon of work. I was (and still am) extremely into Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?** and Live It Out; there's a distinct difference between these two albums and the rest; in the same way Pablo Honey and The Bends are different from later Radiohead albums; the connective tissue is there, you understand how they are related, but earlier songs are more, I guess, 'conventionally' alternative rock music with an aesthetic; later albums, the aesthetic comes more the fore and the traditional guitar sounds find a new or different or less prominent place to live in the mix. However, there's nothing incomplete or inexperienced about these records; both of them live amongst my favourite of their catalogue - Dead Disco, Wet Blanket, Succexxy and Combat Baby are full of drive and energy, while Hustle Rose, On A Slow Night and Love Is A Place signpost the future direction of Metric's music.
While the first album is a collection of interesting songs, Live It Out takes that musical formula and applies it to a series of songs about a young woman confronting her feelings on feminism, the patriarchy, sexuality and a Catholic upbringing. Monster Hospital has a great music video which I strongly recommend you watch, and until the early 2020s, this was the Metric album that I would default to listening to. I think its a front-to-back alternative rock gem which I'd still recommend as an entry point into listening to their music - I think there's something on this album for everyone.
In an unusual turn of events, Metric ended up releasing their debut album third. Grow Up And Blow Away had been recorded before Old World Underground... but had sat in mothballs while songs were tinkered with and re-recorded. While I bemoan the existence of the music streaming services, I honestly had no idea this album existed until I went back through their catalogue in 2022 and found it, nestled in between Live It Out and Fantasies, which I would have sworn blind was their 3rd album to anyone who had asked me before that. This does sound like their Pablo Honey; I've not listened to it extensively, because it sounds like a band putting together some ideas but not really being 100% sure about any of them. It's an interesting insight into their style and intent, even back at the beginning, and I am sure there are Metric fans who would disagree, but for me this feels almost like a collection of bonus material, salvaged from the cutting room floor.
Fantasies marks the point of deviation for me - Help I'm Alive and Gold Guns Girls still show their roots in the previous two albums, but the heavy guitars and 'rock' elements give way to floaty minor key synth lines. It took me a while to warm to this album - I was younger and liked things to stay the way they were when I enjoyed them - but to continue to Radiohead comparison, much like Kid A I found myself on repeated listens drawn back in, compelled now by the differences rather than offended by them. I really love Collect Call off this album as my deep cut of choice, and the fact I won't get to see it live because the Fantasies anniversary tour is US exclusive breaks my heart.
Synthetica continues where Fantasies left off, and I really don't know why I never engaged as much with it as I did the album before, but it really took me coming back to Metric after the pandemic to make me go back and give it the attention it deserves. It's extremely solid, contains some beloved live show staples (Lost Kitten, Breathing Underwater) and there's no real reason that I would have given it so little attention, short of being distracted by other things. Now, at least, I appreciate it in a way that 2012 Rich never did.
I haven't seen David Cronenburg's Cosmopolis, and I am not a film critic. If you are curious about what other people think about it, here's British film critic Mark Kermode talking about it. I also had no idea Metric had helped compose the score, so the Cosmopolis (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was a new album for me to listen to. Like some movie soundtracks, it's much more of a soundscape, with very few real 'songs' on here, but it's definitely a sinister dystopian vibe that fits the Metric style very nicely. Another one for your TTRPG table, this time for games of backroom deals and shady meetings.
Full disclosure, I don't have much to say about Pagans In Vegas or Art Of Doubt; as the albums furthest removed from my original Metric fandom, but just before I fell back in love with Formentera, the only tracks I know even remotely on these albums were the ones I found on the setlist.fm expected playlist for the Formentera tour. I probably need to give these albums some real attention, but it's very difficult to motivate yourself to listen to an album you know less well when there are albums inside that artist's discography which you know you enjoy. I'll show some discipline and give both of these albums a fair shake at some point, I promise.
The global COVID-19 pandemic might have been a stone cold bummer for the entire world, but we got some good music out of it; After a four year hiatus, Metric wrote Formentera while on lockdown, dreaming of the Italian island they would visit when everything was better, and watching the world, wondering if it ever would be again. It takes a certain strength of purpose to open your first album in nearly five years with an 11 minute song about how social media and world events have destroyed peoples mental health, and Doomscroller firmly establishes the tone. The title track exists as the only sign of hope and levity on an album where every other song feels like notes from an emotional therapy session. I listened to this album and The Yeah Yeah Yeah's Cool It Down on a kind of alternating repeat for about 5 months in 2022, and this, their ninth album, is now firmly my favourite. The companion album Formentera II doesn't have that emotional attachment that the first one does, though I appreciate several of the songs of that album as well.
There's so much to enjoy from this band, who always feel under the radar, when I say "We're going to see Metric" and people I know who have wide music tastes say "who?". They deserve better, more fulsome recognition, they deserve to be booked in theatres and city halls, not dingy students unions. I don't know what more they need to do to get there, but I hope somehow it happens. Maybe then I'll get to be present when Emily Haines takes the stage again.
*OK, lets talk about the elephant in the room. If you've seen Scott Pilgrim, you'll have heard Brie Larson singing 'Black Sheep' as part of her performance with The Clash At Demonhead. As a Metric song, it's universally the most streamed, its incredibly popular with the fanbase and its amazing fun to play on the drums. It also does not appear on any of the 10 Metric albums that exist - it was written by the band as almost a parody of their own sound, something they messed around with and then repurposed for the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack. It must be incredibly annoying to have written a song that's so deliberately like you that it's intended almost as a joke, and have it become your most popular song by an incredible distance. Brie Larson sings the version in the movie, but the Emily Haines version is superior.
**Top Tier album name - includes punctuation, sentence structure, no title track, and it reference's a lyric in the song, in fact the opening lyric of the first track, as well as encapsulating some of the album themes. A+, gold star.
