In the run-up to II—the sophomore set from Toronto noisemakers Metz—frontman Alex Edkins promised three things: "We are not going to clean up our sound, we are not going to hire a big producer, we are not going to try to write a radio song." True to his word, II is another snarling beast of a record, 10 more all-lunging, all-screaming anti-anthems crammed into another chaotic, cloistered half-hour, every inch as grotty and combustible and unfriendly as its predecessor. Once again produced by Holy Fuck's Graham Walsh and engineered by Alex Bonefant, II is a refinement, not a reinvention: if you liked Metz, well, have another.
Metz spent five years honing their considerable strengths—Edkins' caustic fretwork and vocal agita, Hayden Menzies and Chris Slorach's stampeding low-end—before unleashing their self-titled debut. And, on II, they seem to feel no particular need to tinker around with what got them here. They still draw most of their inspiration from turn-of-the-'90s post-hardcore and the Nirvana albums on either side of Nevermind, and they still believe three-and-a-half minutes is about as long as any song has the right to be. The terse II comes in a smidge less rigid than its predecessor, a shade or two darker, a touch more physical. Not that you'll notice; once the bassline of opener "Acetate" takes hold, for 30 short minutes, your thoughts become a smear of white. These songs are not "catchy" by any traditional metric; they don't so much get stuck in your head as get lodged in your skin.
Metz take great pains to avoid your standard verse-chorus-verse structures, and II, even more than the debut, downplays the traditionally "songier" aspects of these songs for a series of weaponized strikes. Still, beyond a few drop-outs and punch-ins, these songs all seem to gnash about in a fairly similar fashion. Hayden Menzies' bull-in-a-China-shop drums are unrelenting, but they rarely push too far past their original tempo; Edkins talks his way through a few of these verses, but he's every bit as likely to start off in a full-on wail, and his riffs, while bludgeoning from the get-go, never seem quite sure how to up their own antes.
All of this makes the first 20 or so seconds of any Metz song roughly as thrilling as the last 20, which gives II the feeling of falling down the same set of stairs ten times in a row. There is not, as Edkins promised, anything for the radio on II, but neither is there much attempt to chart new territory, no ambitious gambits or radical tempo-shifts, nothing they haven't already proven themselves capable of in the past. These songs barely give themselves space to meander or develop; they pull the cord, and off they go. By and large, they perform their seethe-pummel-repeat routine with an almost mechanized precision. This one thing, they do incredibly well. Then they do it nine more times.
In fact, II is often more compelling on the rare occasions when Metz pulls back on the brontosaurus riffage and focuses on the connective tissue, the strands of sinew that surround many of these songs. The windchime-scrape at the tail end of "Spit You Out", the frizzy intro lick to "I.O.U.", the whinnying strum at the top of "Kicking a Can of Worms": all these strange, static-y interludes, brief though they may be, build the kind of tension Metz are all too game to release. It's a shame they couldn't find a little more space for it. Fleeting though they are, these little interstitials provide a few much-needed valleys to II's overabundance of peaks.
Throughout II, just about anything is prone to set Edkins off: crass commercialism, self-loathing, painkillers and—horror of horror—waiting in lines. These are angry-sounding songs, no question there. But when a typical chorus goes something like "painkiller, painkiller/ that's why I feel unreal/ painkiller, painkiller/ that's one hell of a deal," you start to wonder if Edkins is really screaming out of some deep-seated passion, or if this is just the kind of music you scream over.
In interviews, Metz claim to be a punk band largely because it's the one genre the three of them could agree on. They're not claiming to be anything they're not, but—after two records far more similar than different—one can't help but wonder what else they could be. Were they willing to risk more, to stretch out further, to try a few more new things on for size, II might've sailed right past its beloved predecessor. But by sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful.
