Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 31/07/06
Label: Drowned In Sound Recordings

Metric's second record is essentially "No Logo" set to music. This is a good thing. The world might possibly be ending soon, and all you can hear on rock radio are songs about chasing cars and the monsters coming over the hill. So all hail Metric's singer Emily Haines, who - like her fellow Canadian Naomi Klein - is a razor-sharp feminist with a political conscience and loads to say for herself. Haines dominates "Live It Out"; it's her state-of-the-world address.

The soul-trampling pointlessness of the corporate rat-race is one of her preoccupations. It finds most thrilling expression on "Handshakes" where, as the song reaches its climax, the music suddenly cuts dead to leave Haines archly intoning, "Buy this car to go to work; go to work to pay for this car", over and over again. It's a new take on that old line about working a job you hate to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like. But it scans better.

It's not Haines' only great line. The album's turbo-charged centrepiece "Monster Hospital" deftly reworks Bobby Fuller to comment on the ultimate ineffectuality of recent anti-war protests: "I fought the war but the war won." On "Police And The Private", meanwhile, Haines exercises her love of wordplay to dissect the western world's culture-of-fear paranoia: "You're working for the police and the private, the pirates and the pilots / Fingerprinted waiting for the train." The feminist in Haines finds expression on "Patriarch On A Vespa", asking: "Are we all brides-to-be? Are we all designed to be confined?"

So, "Live It Out" is a big picture record. It's also a searingly personal one. Haines is not a woman afraid to lay bare her psyche, and she does so most strikingly on "Poster Of A Girl" which offers this equation of promiscuity and insecurity: "I take somebody home / To find out how I feel." Elsewhere, the title track offers a frank tale of rejection: "On the day we were supposed to leave, you changed your mind at the station."

Obviously nobody would pay attention to her smart lyrics if the music didn't compete, but, largely, it does. Though the band's default mode is arena-sized indie-rock of a fairly conventional stripe, they spice things up on "Live It Out" by means of dramatic dynamic shifts (witness opener "Empty" explode into life); unexpected detours into Francophonic, Goldfrapp-style electro ("Poster Of A Girl"); the occasional rock-out (see the shamelessly dumb "bam-shika-bam" intro of "Monster Hospital"); and moments of equally unabashed delicacy ("Glass Ceiling" and "Too Little Too Late" could almost be Howling Bells tunes).

Hence "Live It Out" is working on every level. Maybe this so-called Canadian invasion has teeth. Maybe it's time to go Metric.

    by Niall O'Keeffe