Metric with Lubec
Monday, October 25 at The National
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I was not the writer originally assigned to cover this show. That writer got stuck working a late shift, and I was the only other writer available on such short notice. Before going to this show, I knew very little about Metric. In fact, I had only heard one of their songs. I knew that they had connections to the Broken Social Scene family of bands (Metric members Emily Haines and James Shaw play in the 20-plus-member Canadian supergroup, along with members of Do Make Say Think, Stars, Feist, and more), that they had a charismatic female vocalist, and that they mixed electronic touches with conventional rock instrumentation. I didn't know whether I liked them or not.
We arrived at The National while local openers Lubec were playing. I've been impressed by their recent studio work, but this was my first time seeing them live. The venue was not sold out, but definitely was more than half full, so Lubec got the opportunity to play for hundreds of local kids who might never have heard them otherwise. They made good use of it, playing their distorted pop songs with fervor and grace and winning over the entire crowd. I had been curious as to what sort of crowd Metric would draw, and looking around upon arrival at the National, I saw a lot of hands marked with the X's that mean "under 21." Teenagers, being at a point in their lives when they want to attract attention, are natural-born hecklers. No doubt they will someday look back at the things they did at concerts at this age and feel a vague sense of embarrassment. However, at their current ages, opportunities for heckling seem like their time to shine. So when Lubec would finish a song, it would only take a few seconds for the clapping to die down and the heckles to spring forth. They weren't malevolent heckles, either; as I said, Lubec won the crowd over quickly, and they took the jests of the crowd in stride, retorting to the heckles and poking fun at themselves when they made mistakes or took too long to tune. Their set was fun, and I saw nothing I didn't like from it. One can only hope that they made a few new fans, and that next time they play at some smaller local venue, some of the kids from the Metric show will come out and heckle them some more.
Once Lubec was finished, I headed toward the front of the stage. I ended up surrounded by the sort of awkward, hyperactive kids that are still too young to know how to act "cool." When the bands were playing, they danced with wild abandon, unconcerned with how they looked or what people around them thought of them. Now, while waiting for Metric to take the stage, they chattered excitedly amongst themselves, giving off waves of raw anticipation. I love being around these kinds of kids. I'm much more comfortable with their wide-eyed appreciation of everything they encounter at shows like this than I am with the standard jaded cynicism of people my own age. The evening's environment reminded me of all-ages shows I'd gone to back when I'd been a teenager myself. For me, though, those shows had been punk shows at much smaller local venues. There was an essential difference between the shows at which I came of age and this Metric show. No matter how alternative a band that plays at the National may be, shows at the National are rock shows, with their essential separation between bands and audience. That separation helps strengthen the impression that people in bands are somehow more interesting, more real, than the average person. This is the central tenet of celebrity culture in the 21st century: being famous makes you a higher class of human. It's an idea that's become so universally embraced that even reality show stars who are famous only for being ridiculous (i.e. the cast of Jersey Shore) develop an air of entitlement about themselves almost immediately.
Now, I'm no cultural snob; I don't think that there's anything wrong with young kids getting into more commercially-focused indie music instead of punk. But what I worry about is the cultural values that the modern indie scene passes on to them. Indie rock in the 90s was culturally closer to punk rock than it was to mainstream culture, but in the post-OC world, indie has gone mainstream. Such a thing can hardly be blamed on Metric specifically, and I'm not trying to make this their fault--it's the state of the genre, and I recognize that. But I can't pretend that I am into it. Encountering this dynamic at a Nickelback show is disappointing, but hardly surprising. However, I found it a bit jarring that Metric's performance seemed designed to remind the audience that these people are rock stars, that they are not like you. The way the band looked further emphasized this difference--nobody in the crowd looked anything like the performers onstage. The three male members wore rumpled dress shirts, vests and ties, getting the "sleazy rock dude" look down cold. Emily Haines, in turn, had the "frontwoman as emaciated model" look, her impossibly skinny frame draped in an off-the-shoulder gold lamé top and shiny stretch pants. As she danced and strutted around the stage, her thin blonde hair was constantly in her face, adding to the disheveled beauty queen look.
But before I go on, let me make something clear--no matter how it might seem so far, this is not a bad review. I might have had some weird political issues with the arena-rock conventions being unthinkingly played out onstage (and, to tell the truth, I kind of always do, even if I don't always say so), but those issues were unable to withstand the blast of awesomeness that was Metric's set. Like I said, I'd heard one Metric song before coming to this show, and that song, "Dead Disco," is seven years old. I didn't expect to hear it at all, and was pleasantly surprised when it showed up second-to-last in the main set. But before that, it was just one long wash of songs I didn't know. And they were all amazing. Metric's live sound is louder and more dominated by guitars and distortion than their studio recordings are, but they have the same fundamental feel. They remind me of bands that came out of the UK in the early 90s, at the same time that the alternative/grunge revolution was happening in the United States. It's hard to pin down exactly which of those bands that they remind me of, since they aren't really nailing the sound of any one in particular. I hear bits and pieces of Catherine Wheel, Curve, later Jesus And Mary Chain, and even Cocteau Twins, but chopped up into component parts and rearranged so completely that to say that Metric "sounds like" any of those bands would be a lie. Then there are the other influences that complicate the mix even further; for example, the drummer's willingness to underpin fundamentally rocking riffs with straight-up dance beats. And soaring and swirling overtop of it all are Emily Haines's keyboard lines, which play the same role in the band as lead guitar parts would, only sounding a lot less generic than any guitar ever could.
In the live environment, though, Haines kept her keyboard playing to a minimum, spending much more time in frontwoman mode. Her energy never flagged throughout the hour-plus set, and she stalked the edge of the stage, reaching out to the crowd and grabbing their full attention with her hypnotic gaze. She held the entire room under her sway by the end of the set, needing only to gesture in one direction or another to cause huge sections of the room to freak out. The main set ended with Metric's most recent single, "Stadium Live," which was tailor-made for crowd participation. Between the reverb on Haines's microphone and the fact that my hearing has degraded from years of loud rock shows, I couldn't make out what she was saying as she led the crowd in call-and-response chants, but the effect it had on the audience was obvious. When the band abandoned the stage before the encore, the place went ballistic, and even if encores hadn't been de rigeur at every rock show for the last 20 years, the enthusiastic crowd at the National would have demanded that Metric come back out and play a few more.
Their two-song encore started out with the loudest song of the night--the frantic, pounding "Black Sheep," recently given a higher profile by its inclusion in the film version of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (performed in the film by fictional band The Clash At Demonhead, whose singer was apparently modeled after Emily Haines). After blowing the place apart--and destroying at least my eardrums--with "Black Sheep," Metric did a 180-degree switch, with the rhythm section leaving the stage and guitarist James Shaw switching to an acoustic guitar. Shaw and Haines ended the show with a sweet, heartfelt acoustic version of "Gimme Sympathy," from their most recent album, Fantasies. The change in mood was significant, but it worked incredibly well, and the song clearly had significant emotional relevance for the majority of the crowd. At the end of the song, Haines sang a few notes of the song's synth melody, which hadn't been part of the bare-bones acoustic arrangement, and was almost immediately drowned out by the crowd singing it right back to her. It was a beautiful thing. It made me wish that I had gone into the show knowing more of Metric's music, so I could be part of it, rather than just an observer. This tender, intimate moment at the close of the set seemed like a true connection between crowd and audience, one that no amount of stage barriers and rock show atmosphere could ever prevent or take away. Despite all of my initial misgivings, it's that connection that formed my final impression of Metric as a band. I went into this show not knowing whether I liked them or not. I know now. Next time they come to Richmond, you can expect to see me there.