Metric are a band of geopolitical extremes. Frontperson Emily Haines was born in India, raised in Canada, and eventually wound up splitting her time between London and Brooklyn, where she and Metric guitarist James Shaw once lived with future members of Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Haines, a vocal critic of consumer society, also licenses her songs to television dramas and Polaroid commercials (a bowdlerized version of the title track from Grow Up and Blow Away was used to promote I-Zone film). In fact, Metric's songs are often characterized by a commercial sheen-- they're smart little packets that, even as anti-consumerism screeds, have a compact luster that makes you feel like getting online to price experimental shelving units from Ikea or browsing all-over print hoodies at H&M.
None of this is to criticize Metric for hypocrisy, it's simply to position them as a band that has no qualms about jockeying for visibility-- in the process amassing reams of the sort of context that can sometimes drown out a band's music. So you might know Metric for any of the reasons above, or from Emily Haines' solo project, Emily Haines and Soft Skeleton, or from her otherworldly vocal turn on Broken Social Scene's beloved "Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl". And yeah, you might also know them as yet another band in the Broken Social Scene constellation, although they more closely resemble the glossy electro-pop of Stars.
But this album, Metric's lost debut of sorts, gives us a chance to get to know them more intimately-- as a charming singer/songwriterly band poised to arrive a little too late for the 1990s alterna-rock boom, when they would have fit in snugly with bubble-poppers, like Letters to Cleo, and scorers of imaginary films, like Self. While both of Metric's official LPs, 2003's Old World Underground, Where are You Now? and 2005's Live it Out were met with a generally favorable critical reception (the latter was nominated for the Polaris Prize and the Juno), the negative responses often took the band to task for bloat and clutter.
Grow Up and Blow Away was recorded between 1999 and 2001, and was meant to be Metric's debut LP, but it got lost in the shuffle when their label, Reckless Records, was purchased by Rykodisc. The album has been available on the internet for years, but this marks its first hard release, and it showcases Metric as a two-piece, before bassist Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key became permanent members. As such, there's less leeway for clutter, and Haines' arresting songwriting (not to mention her fertile rapport with Shaw) shines through. The album is fully a product of Metric's signature style, where electro-pop, trip-hop, and good old indie rock underpin Haines' effortless charisma. Despite its textural richness, it's feather-light; it's also comely and stylish. In fact, Metric's neophyte effort might be their best.
Grow Up and Blow Away's phrasing is redolent of another album that was being recorded around the same time, which also felt like it could have made some mainstream waves had it appeared a few years earlier and shed a few experimental tendencies: Dismemberment Plan's Change. It's stiffly funky, with prickly mechanical drums, supple bass lines, and skittering piano loops as its propulsive grist. Guitars are present, but they take a backseat to the pianos, and when the do appear, they're often deployed so texturally they sound more like guiros. It's structured more like disco than indie rock: simple, striking passages that would be easy to retrofit for an extended mix loop and shuffle. Like Travis Morrison, Haines is more attuned to the stylized melodies of modern r&b than indie rock's more naturalistic, colloquial singing style. She swings with a simple yet elegant dexterity from syllable to bell-clear syllable. This especially comes to the fore on "The Twist", a dreamy r&b synth dirge that sounds like a mannered precursor to Cocorosie's "Werewolf".
Haines' lyrics are also remindful of Morrison's, with their pithy, existential inclinations. The title track, a meditation on suburban ennui set to an ice-blue ribbon of fizzy synths, gives us the first of the album's many modern koans: "If this is the life, why does it feel so good to die today?" (or "fly away," as Polaroid would have it). "Hardwire", sultry and chiming, gives us the skyscraping chorus "You are everything; you are nothing at all." And "Rock Me Now", a spoken-word piece about burning out in Vegas, is almost hard to swallow, but Haines really sells it. Perhaps her confidence stems from having Paul Haines, a poet who often collaborated with jazz muscians, for a father, most notably on Escalator Over the Hill with Carla Bley. But that work was dark and impenetrable in the Scott Walker mold, while "Rock Me Now" is a jazzbo wisp, breezy and trim. It's a manicured lawn to her father's impenetrable weeds. "His value declined when he offered his name," Haines breathes, slipping into a staccato backing harmony as Shaw echoes her in eerie falsetto over a disco churn.
"My old flame broke the 12-bar blues just to prove he could," Haines coos amid the splashy drums and mincing pianos of "On the Sly". "He pays the airline DJs now; he is everywhere," while the kids "get high and eat TV." With evocative lines like these, Haines roughs out the proportions of her subjective world, focusing on whatever details command her attention from her post in its very center. And she doesn't take this subjectivity for granted: "Climb the wall to make the sun rise in time," she sings on "Soft Rock Star" (which appears here in two distinct yet complementary versions). This drive to render the world not as a set of facts, but as a phantasmagorical realm wholly contingent on the presence of a viewer, gives the album its lyrical heft and specific personality. Paired with early Metric's less-is-more approach, it makes for an immersive record that feels much fresher than its long incubation period would seem to warrant.
