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Go read this article about Metric's new album

Read the biography about Metric here on thesixtyone - there are some really interesting insights into the process behind the creation of the new album, Fantasies.

When I was still a student journalist Metric was just getting started - and I the only reason I didn't try and set up an interview for my newspaper was because it just didn't seem right for some stupid reason to use that as a cheap excuse to meet the band - but I love the interview clips here, regardless of whether the site author got them from an actual interview or just from a press kit put out by the band. I've inserted some choice quotes with my commentary here:

When you hand over your money for a concert ticket, what are you really paying for: some idea of the performer you've gleaned from gazing longingly at album covers and compulsively clicking YouTube videos, or the performer as they choose to express themselves on that given day? Is the consumer entitled to a certain expectation of the performance — a satisfaction-guaranteed procession of "the hits"— or should the artist interpret the fan's investment as a vote of confidence, that the fan is willing to follow their every whim? In other words, is the customer really king, relegating the artist to the role of a court jester whose sole purpose is to entertain on demand? Or does the artist, elevated up on the stage and paid for the privilege, still dictate the terms of the contract?

For Metric frontwoman Emily Haines, all these questions came to a head on the evening of March 30, 2008 at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto. She was all set to perform the sombre piano-based ballads that comprised the two releases from her solo venture, The Soft Skeleton: Knives Don't Have Your Back and What Is Free To a Good Home? — much of which were written following a time of great sadness and personal loss. But having performed those songs so many times since Knives' September 2006 release, Haines had an epiphany during that Phoenix show — she didn't want to be sad anymore. And she didn't want to play those songs. So, about 40 minutes into the show, she stopped "Dr. Blind" mid-verse and said just that: "I don't want to play these songs anymore." Instead, she spent the next half hour talking to her fans, encouraging them to join her at the piano on stage and, for the grand finale, pulling a kid from the audience for an impromptu duet on Metric's "Live It Out." She was up for anything — except playing those songs. Some disappointed Soft Skeleton fans in the crowd probably thought the show was a trainwreck. But for Haines herself, it was about getting her mind back on track — to the business of completing Metric's long-awaited fourth album, Fantasies.

"Writing for me comes from a process of trying to piece things together," says Haines. "The function of music in my life is to help me understand what the hell is happening. This new record was about ending the fragmentation of my existence. Everything in the world right now — all the technology, the way we listen to music or watch films — everything has changed so much in my lifetime. People are allowed to have multiple identities — you're somebody online, you're somebody else in public — in multiple dimensions, scattered across the world… I wanted to bring all that into one place, one band, one record… I want to be one person."

 One of the many things I like about Metric is how intelligent the music sounds - you want to crank it loud not just because it's good, but to hear the gentle nuance in the songs.

But in order to come together, Metric first had to drift apart. After touring non-stop between 2003's breakthrough release Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? and 2005's frenzied follow-up Live It Out, the four members of Metric sought sanctuary in sideline pursuits — Haines threw herself into the Soft Skeleton and took a soul-cleansing sojourn to Argentina; guitarist/co-founder Jimmy Shaw built a neighborhood recording facility, Giant Studio, on Toronto's burgeoning Ossington Avenue strip with his neighbor Sebastian Grainger; while the Oakland, California-based rhythm section of bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key toured their own garage-rock offshoot, Bang Lime.

Ironically I saw Sebastian Grainger's live show last Friday. It was LOUD and fun.

"We didn't have a moment where we stopped," says Haines. "When I look back at the touring, it really was like 300 days a year for those three years [between 2003 and 2006]. After that, I thought if we went straight into recording the next album right away we would end up just writing about being in a band on the road because that's all we had experienced. We had to reconnect with our humanity first."

If you ever complain about a band not putting out anything new - this is most valid reason why they should take their time doing exactly what Emily describes. The next couple of paragraphs are a very fun insight into the writing process.

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."

That was good - the description of Stadium Love is even better.

And no song better encapsulates the utter surreality of dreaming — that peculiar combination of bliss and terror — than Fantasies' massive glam-rockin' closer "Stadium Love," a song meant to be heard in the building it's named after, but whose candy-coated "ooh-ooh-ie-ooh" chorus just might distract you from all the crazy *** happening during the verses in between.

Haines explains: "I had just gotten back from Coachella, and I walked into the studio and noticed on the bulletin board that Joules had written 'spider vs bat,' i think he had been obsessively watching all these National Geographic animals-fighting-each-other-videos in his hotel room. For me, that phrase triggered an entire narrative that was about a gladiator-style enormo-dome where everything turns in on itself, with every form of aggression on display for spectators: monster trucks ramming into each other, bull fighting, sweaty men wrestling.

She goes on to describe swans against elephants, pigs versus tigers, and other madness which you'll miss unless you listen to the song carefully - which will prompt leave you feeling five kinds of delighted. The ending to the article waxes poetic on this - the last sentence is a bit cliched but that's ok, the rest of it was a fun read.

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

Go check out the full article!