Metric
“Help I’m Alive” (mp3)
from “Fantasies”
(Arts & Crafts Mexico)

More On This Album

Formed in Toronto but, at various times, based in Montreal, London, New York and L.A., Metric boasts the sort of history that requires one of those connect-the-dots redlined maps you see in an Indiana Jones movie — and the story of Fantasies is no different. First stop: Bear Creek, located outside Seattle, Washington.

“The four us went out into the woods as a band with no expectations and did whatever we wanted” Haines recalls. “We were coming from London so it was a serious contrast – it felt like we had left civilization and all that mattered was music again. We wrote a lot of songs there including ‘Gimme Sympathy’, ‘Collect Call’… and ‘Black Sheep’, which isn’t on the album ’cause it has a life of its own. When I listen to the finished record, I feel like all its warmth comes from that place in the woods.”

In their recent episode of the Bruce McDonald-produced IFC documentary series, The Rawside Of…, Metric can be seen performing these songs in stripped-down, acoustic versions, and following the taut, barb-wired rock of Live It Out, it would’ve made total sense for the band to pursue a simple, back-to-basics approach further. But as the scene shifted over the course of 2007 and 2008 — back to Toronto and then New York, with Haines’ Argentina retreat in between — so too did the shape of the album. And through rigorous road-testing of the new songs, the mercurial material gradually solidified into a singular sound.

“We toured the new songs a lot,” Shaw says, “because you might play something 30 times live before you start to realize, ‘Why did I get bored every single time I got to the second verse?’ and ‘Why does the ending always suck?’ The songs went through a lot of surgery, and we really feel like we sculpted them and got the best out of them. I felt like I could hear the sound of the whole thing in my head — it was really big and really dreamy. There were images of chasing invisible butterflies and pterodactyls coming out of their shells and flying off prehistoric cliffs. The sound of the record was more based on the idea of soaring pterodactyls than on that of another band, or some ’70s sound.”

And so an album that began its life as an acoustic jam session in the bucolic woods outside Seattle ends in a cartoon orgy of bloodshed in some mythical arena that exists in the darkest recesses of Emily Haines’ mind. Each extreme represents a fantasy in their own right: the ideal of hermetic artistic purity versus the spectacle of excess and decadence. Being yourself versus being what they want you to be. Emily Haines stared down these very polarities on her own that night at the Phoenix, but with Fantasies, Metric are now free to define their reality on their own terms. So when, amid the daydream electro of “Gimme Sympathy,” Haines invokes that age-old existential dilemma — “Who would you rather be: The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?” — it’s only because she already knows the answer: neither.

Have the Featured Artist Free Download delivered directly to you via your favourite RSS catcher, iTunes or to your inbox by subscribing.