Metric hardly focus on a beauteous form of love. Much like the design on the Art of Doubt album cover the way they shape love is as skewed as an odd circle, one refusing to even connect the dots. Metric’s version of love is nestled in the dark, requiring a deeper understanding of their dense material. This density has always been with the Toronto band since their first records. It’s not style over substance; they don’t flaunt their electronica with avant-guard flair or make their lyrics as cryptic as code. They live in the dark, trying to bear with it, not bask in it.
This differentiation is advantageous when comparing them to their Canadian contemporaries. Metric function more like a less powerhouse version of Arcade Fire and a heavier Broken Social Scene. On this record, they make the theme of time and waiting their domain. They view love and life through this lens, as if it is a subject heavily researched and requiring its own particular classifications. They simultaneously complicate and simplify the task of waiting through lyrical statements and sonic harshness.
What Metric do well is craft their songs in ways that benefit the dancefloor. They are not necessarily dancing material, especially when concentrating on the lyrics, yet there is an ethereal quality to Emily Haines’ voice that complement the strings of James Shaw and Joshua Winstead. The intense drumming of Joules Scott-Key and hypnotizing electronic components push these machinations forward, too. “Dark Saturday” drills into the earth with its pounding riffs, while “Dressed to Suppress” commits to this with a held back distortion. Haines’ vocal range has a ghastly quality when it reaches its highs and a demanding one with its lows. Their alternating is justified in both creating a lively and haunting atmosphere.
This justification goes further by underlining the theme of waiting. This waiting is wholly ambiguous. A similar band would wait for love and stretch that desire for an entire album’s runtime, but Metric are more complicated. There is so much LCD Soundsystem influence on “Now or Never Now” that it feels like a brother to the aforementioned band’s “All My Friends”. Haines sings, “Only silence can repair / My sense of self I lost somewhere.” Though the tune is more attuned to the dancefloor, it is nonetheless a view of time as a caretaker. It is a defragmented look at the adage “Time heals all wounds.” Being that Metric are a band with at least a decade of experience, this is a line with merit. Time is what the band hold on to when everything seems dim.
“Love You Back” demonstrates the flip side of the coin, peeling attention toward impatience and haste. “When you’ve got no time / You’re gonna want it back / You’re gonna act so bad / You’re gonna act so badly,” Haines sings after her frenzied intro, forcing a relationship due to the stillness of rainy days.
This rush is similarly shown in the poppy “Risk” and the consequential “Anticipate”. It is these revelations that perfect a lingering theme in the band’s work: the past, present, and future. This is a band that claims that the future is theirs but so is the past. Every work focuses on that latter element and how to build on one’s self. This album concentrates on what happens when that well-built foundation crumbles down because of doubt and desire.
Metric is not a band that needs to hone in on experimentation. They instead rend audiences to their gaze by claiming a footing on a theme and looking at it through its darker elements and create something moving in the process. Their audiences will flail like they are limp through a concert, yet they know what sort of chaos they dance to: it is the disaster of life, and one cannot help but bask in the realization rather than the darkness.