Metric - London Scala - 10/2/07
3/5
By: Michael Lewin
Nothing sets off the sodden gnawing of ennui, heavy and empty, in Rockfeedback's chest than the sight of a Good Band playing live.
Cinema can often have this effect. Two thirds of the way through the latest American Indie flick of dysfuncto-familial faintly witty distanced melancholia. That knowledge that a film says nothing - ABSOLUTELY BLOODY NOTHING AT ALL, except for the bitter f**k you of late thirties filmmakers' directed at their parents and dressed up as universally meaningful by using oddball child protagonists and so excusing what is in fact no more than artless whimsy and self-absorption.
The modern novel - likewise. To whit: who will rid me of this turbulent McEwan?
But a Good Band live - ohhh... not for me anger at the insipid band, nor malaise derived from the uninspired or the drudgery of the banal. No, it's all about seeing Good Bands and in that mid-set vitality, in that passion on stage and it's reciprocation on the floor... it's all about counter-intuitively clasping your hands to your breast in that joyous, explosive conclusion, and deflating - knowing that there just isn't an inexhaustible source of this energy and that it'll just... fade.
But first to Chalk! Let's us to the moment instead: and so lose ourselves in flitting, giddy conversations in overlong bar queues, in giggle fits brought on by near-placebo NO2 and the gloriously dignity-stripping act of puff-cheeked huffing into a balloon. Ah! for the sight of the recently deceased Trash's facial follicle hipsters doing likewise.
Chalk is new, and so is free still of those small cliques that form amongst our fair capital's indie nights, retaining the good time of the just-discovered rather than wearing stoopingly and suspiciously the boredom of the been-there nights (c.f. The Hawley Arms most recently, and Frog most prominently). As such, high-spirits and warmth abound more readily, acceptance and kinship profligate rather than denied.
And this atmosphere, that's what we must extend over the gig: a fabulous bubble floating through nebula, cocooning us forever in a single, simple happy instant. Cut us adrift from the onslaught of progression towards the new that music seems caught in today, and unconcerned revelry be our friend tonight. Black Francis is a happy man as the opening, insistent tinkle of new single 'Empty' fills the room.
It was the highlight from last year's 'Let It Out', and is resolutely the highlight of the set too. Opening with the kind of simple melodic guitar riff that occasionally tricks one into believing the guitar band still breathes and thrives - that riff is a pulse, a life sign, confirmed by the rest of the song, a mid-90s college rock monster, that lives and fights on that pulsing energy.
In today's musical climes, a return to quiet-LOUD dynamics seems like a revolution - in lesser hands than Metric's, though, it might too easily have seemed a Luddite one. Instead, with over-driven guitars and the wry and the bleak of Emily "legs" Haines' lyrics, it's a seduction - 'Monster Hospital' their most effective weapon, the indie equivalent of seamed-stockings and high heels with artful, intelligent lyrics and dynamics that the Pixies and Albini honed years ago. Metric's artillery is like that used by freedom fighters the world over - outmoded and almost obsolete. But very effective when wielded efficiently, nonetheless.
The enthusiastic thrusts, shakes and wails that greeted Metric's arrival on stage never dissipate, and reaction is thunderous, rapturous. Rightly - such vigour, such wit and such balls are rarely shown on stage, and even more rarely do they seem so pleasing that it could tempt even the most jaded. Metric actually rocked, like bands did fifteen years ago.
But there one stands, sad amidst a boiling mass of happy, excited folk dancing and moaning and kissing. Why? Because, as I said earlier, there was no future. The notes are dead before they play them, the riffs and the shifts just memories.
Here are tunes, and melodies, and sex, and intelligence, and here is definitely rock. Here is energy and vigour and desperation, but here, against all reason, was not vitality.
Metric are already seven years old as a band. Emily Haines just released a great - though bleak - solo album. How sad that the striking energy of their ascent, based on the vitality of rock, feels as though it has already been spent even as they reach a new height. How sad to see a Good Band climb as high as they have, and know that most likely they'll climb no higher, because the fight has gone and instead they can only use up what momentum they have left. There'll be a time to explore this past again, but it isn't now. Crystal Castles played before them, and showed another path we might follow. I'm gonna skip down their chip-hop lane, memories be damned.
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