If Metric is all about "sweaty fucking," as the band once suggested, lead singer Emily Haines' first official solo outing, Knives Don't Have Your Back, is a poisoned-cigarette come down. While Metric's pedestrian neu wave often glosses over Haines' political and feminist tracts, Knives delves into her incisive gloom full-bore-- and her misery is good company. Metric's clunky riffage and hi-hat beats are replaced by simple piano figures and subtle adornments (strings, feedback, breathing organ) that draw out Haines' most stirring vocal performances to date, and the muted milieu highlights her natural, sensuous whisper, lending a sympathetic thrust to these broken-down anthems for a thirtysomething girl.
The daughter of an admired jazz poet, Haines takes advantage of the solo spotlight, crafting words that mix her world-weary bite with newly homed ambiguities and painful self-awareness. "I really don't relate to the female singer-songwriter," Haines said in a recent Under the Radar interview. "You're all precious and everyone has to hush while you go over the shadows of your emotions. I've always hated that." The sentiment is admirable but misleading; while obviously taken with Chan Marshall and Juliana Hatfield confessionals, Haines adds her own peeking shadows-- coping with her father's sudden death, the instability of life on the road, and the currently confused feminist fight-- that make Knives' piano elegies dark like diary entries inked during anxious, sleepless nights.
As her surroundings crumble, Haines attempts to make sense of the ruin. Struck through the singer's prism of pessimism, her role as the driving force behind a successful indie act becomes emotionally ravaging on "Crowd Surf Off a Cliff". Dismayed with success ("it won't be enough to be rich"), contemplating two-and-a-half-kids normalcy ("All the babies tucked away in their beds, we're out here screaming, 'The life that you thought through is gone!'"), and exhausted by long-distance love ("You'd better make it quick 'cause this call costs a fortune and it's late where you live"), Haines doesn't seem ungrateful as much as drained.
There's no breathing room on Knives, no hint of forced uplift. Even when Haines seems to run from her own life with the dreamy observations of "Reading in Bed", she's quick to catch herself: "With all the luck you've had why are your songs so sad?" Though the unyielding dourness of death marches like "The Last Page" and "Nothing & Nowhere", and confusing hallucinations like "Detective Daughter" add little to the minor-chord canon, Haines employs a skillful cast-- including Metric's Jimmy Shaw and Sparklehorse's Scott Minor-- to add textural variation. Both "The Lottery", a lament addressing the regression of feminist ideals, and the anti-pharmaceutical diatribe "Doctor Blind" benefit from flittering strings and distorted echoes that sounds like Jonny Greenwood climbing up the walls. At its most haunted, the album is reminiscent of Elliott Smith's final compositions, with Haines' voice sunken and drifting.
Knives starkly places Haines' vulnerabilities on view. It's a brave move that trumps her usual combative cleverness with Metric. On the closing track, "Winning", she offers the album's loveliest lullaby melody and inherits the role of comforting parent: "What's bad?/ We'll fix it/ What's wrong?/ We'll make it alright/ It's gone/ We'll find it/ Takes so long/ We've got time, all the time." The brief respite from sullen existentialism is defensive but palpable; a deep, stipulation-filled grin-and-bear-it. But while often excruciating, Knives' catharsis is mostly inclusive. As a sobering meditation on modern melancholy, it's mired in loss but never completely loses.
