It’s past 1 a.m. at the Phoenix last Thursday night, and singer Emily Haines is sprawled on the stage, cradling a keyboard in her lap and playing it with one hand while the rest of her band builds up what started off as a quiet, poem-like number to a thunderous finish. It’s the end of Metric’s headlining set at eye mag’s Canadian Music Week showcase, and though the band was on this same stage playing pretty much the same set just last December, this night is somehow different-like watching a band literally hit their stride right in front of your eyes.
Metric are no strangers to critical and fan adoration-their debut album, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, hit pretty much every year-end best-of list you can think of (including garnering the number-one pick from both the Toronto Star’s music critics), and they’ve gone from opening for their pals Broken Social Scene (Haines and her partner, guitarist James Shaw, are both members of the loose Scene collective-that’s her singing the much-loved “Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl”) at that previous Phoenix stop, to topping the bill for last week’s extremely sold-out show.
But it’s been a long, hard journey that’s taken the band from Toronto to New York to L.A.-along the way, they recorded a winsome electro-pop album (Grow Up and Blow Away) that got entangled in the requisite record label woes and was never released; lived through 9/11 and the embers of the now red-hot New York indie-rock scene; and came by their current scrappy, disco-rock sound honestly-by relying on, and believing in, themselves.
But it’s hard to be an up-and-coming band when your van gets stolen. Three days before Metric’s triumphant hometown show, Haines is on the line from their distributor’s office in Montreal, sounding resigned. The rest of the band hasn’t joined her yet from New York because someone’s gone and swiped their van. “I’ll be calling our insurance company after I get off the phone with you,” she jokes. Luckily, their equipment wasn’t in the vehicle at the time, but it’s yet another thing for the self-sufficient band to worry about.
But Haines doesn’t seem too concerned about the van-she’s more interested in talking about big ideas-politics, the media, the role of art. Old World Underground is littered with such concepts-it’s as literate as it is melodic, a rarity in today’s often-empty indie rock landscape where making it onto magazine covers seems more important than making good music.
“It’s really weird-I normally don’t read the press stuff, but in the last week, I’ve suddenly had this awareness of the perception of the music, and it’s really strange,” Haines offers. “I’m totally flattered and happy to have made it into people’s stereos, but I’ve just become too aware of the indie-rock world and its own high-school yearbook celebrity shit… It seems so glaringly obvious that no one really cares about the world outside of this little social net, and it’s really freaking me out to be part of it.”
Haines’ own social scene includes growing up with several members of BSS at a Toronto arts school, and later meeting Shaw at a gig by mutual friends at the Horseshoe. About three years ago, the nascent version of Metric was a mainstay in the local clubs-you couldn’t miss seeing their name in the listings, and Emily’s gossamer voice and Shaw’s angular guitar lines quickly won the hearts of local critics and those in the know. And just as they were being touted as a local band to watch, they split, first to NYC, then later, L.A. Haines says it was their version of ‘you have to leave to come back’-following the overwhelming crowd response at the Phoenix, she looked visibly touched when she called out, “Thank you, Toronto-you’re my dream.”
“As a writer-if that doesn’t sound too pretentious-that’s what I’ve been doing,” Haines says about the group’s nomadic existence, “Just going places and writing about it. Definitely being in New York at that time and watching what can only be described as the disintegration of America (as far as I’m concerned), and recently we just did a massive US tour, through the whole country, from Seattle to Orlando-I feel like I’m saturated with information about the state of things there.”
Part of Metric’s appeal is their political edge-Haines’ pointed lyrics in songs like “Combat Baby” and “Succexxy” play off her slick snyth lines and the killer rhythm section. In concert, Haines is a live wire, shrieking out lyrics and doing high kicks one minute, icily delivering social commentary the next. Her between-song rants at the Phoenix proved arguably nearly as entertaining as the music, as she took aim at a certain local rock radio station and exhorted the audience to “keep thinking” as a parting shot.
“I’m disappointed when I read reviews that completely disregard that [political] content-which I just don’t understand, because that’s so obviously what the fuck we’re doing as a band,” Haines declares. “The point of ‘fight off the lethargy’ [a line from “Combat Baby”] is not like an aerobics routine-it’s supposed to be so that you can come out of being depressed about shit and feel validated by the fact that other people are also freaking out a bit.”
But instead of the expected backlash many pop artists get when they get too outspoken, Metric are finding kindred spirits at every tour stop.
“I get e-mails from people in the military all the time,” exclaims Haines. “I got one from this woman whose e-mail is like ‘dot-navy’ or something. Oddly enough, Florida and Texas were just explosive shows, with people definitely reacting to that, to the content.”
The band’s awareness and indie ethos carries through into the business side of their work as well-after the frustration of years of dealing with the music industry, their lawyer, Chris Smith, formed his own label, Last Gang Records, specifically in order to release their album, and they have a similar deal in the US with everloving Records, an upstart one-man operation that saw some success with the soundtrack to horror flick Donnie Darko last year.
Back at the Phoenix, the miniskirted, tiny Haines fixes the crowd with a piercing stare before taking a deep breath to start the final song, and a total hush descends over the room. She’s all alone in the spotlight, playing the keys and singing solo before the rest of her band slinks back in to join her. They finish the song, and for the first time all night, Haines seems to truly relax as she gets up off the floor and smiles and waves goodbye.
Something she had said in the interview comes to mind: “The main thing I learned from the earlier [industry] nightmares was just to never expect anyone else to manifest your potential for you. The great breakthrough for me and everyone else in the band was, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, forget it-I’m just going to realize my own potential myself.’ I’m not going to look good, because I don’t have the airbrushing, and it’s not a coordinated campaign, it’s pretty human. We’ve worked really hard, but when you think about the kind of funds and manpower that a lot of acts get, I’m pretty proud that we’ve accomplished what we have with just guts.”
