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Listening to Metric’s debut album, released in the UK six years after its recording, it’s difficult to figure who more stupid – the record company for shelving the release in the first place, or the band for accepting the decision and swerving onto a much rockier path. Because, put simply, 'Grow Up And Blow Away' is one of the best debut albums of the year. Or of 2001. Or of any year. Forget, for an instant, that sometime Broken Social Scener Emily Haines’ group have subsequently released a couple of albums of varying quality and heaviness. Forget that Haines herself has an excellent folk career with Soft Skeleton. This is an excellent, intelligent record, which puts much of the current output of Ms Nash and Mika into focus. And it’s only taken half a decade for them to realise it.
From the first languid lines of the eponymous ‘Grow Up and Blow Away’, “If this is the life/ Why does it feel so god to die today?” you realise that this will be an entirely different proposition to their raucous ‘proper’ debut, 2005’s ‘Old World Underground, Where are You Now?’ Using synthesisers and drum machines to create a swirling, dreamy pop song reminiscent of Stars, Metric’s title track is so deliciously populist is was chosen to soundtrack a self-consciously kooky advert for Polaroid in the early years of the century.
Standout track ‘Soft Rock Star’ is a single that is the measure of most current female-fronted indie bands. Unfettered by any attempt to out-trendy anyone else (perhaps this was what 2001 sounded like – my cloudy recollections of being 17 extend only to dodging Korn CDs in Our Price while trying to find a skinny fit Strokes T-shirt – oh, how times have changed) this is a poke in the ribs of childhood idols selling-out - “I tried looking up to you girls/ Please correct me, but didn't you let the work slide/ Capitalize on a novelty, cheap pink, spotlight.” By far the best track on the album, it seems inexplicable – in fact, downright offensive - that this wasn’t given a release. The official line behind ‘Grow Up…’s’ near non-release is that the band has moved on from their pop roots, and their fans wouldn’t be able to recognise them. Well, try ‘em. ‘Soft Rock Star’ is easily as good as their recent work - ballsy, sexy, and with a hook that Karen O would burn an $800 corset for. Tacked onto the end is a Jimmy vs Joe mix – superfluous, possibly, but it gives an idea of what Metric might have sounded like if they’d recorded today, with an even heavier electronica influence taking much of the vulnerability out of Haines’ vocals.
Elsewhere, one of the most disarming moments of the album is ‘Rock Me Now’ – a morbid, spoken word dissection of lost west coast dreams. A close cousin of Eels ‘Susan’s House’, right down to the references to “When she was seven year old/ She saw a man get shot/ But no-one came for a long time/ Because it happened in a remote parking lot in Las Vegas.” In most other hands this would come across as clichéd – especially so many years down the line – but here Haines almost treats it as a jazz standard – icy, sexy and downright sexy.
They even channel the ghosts of Britney and Christina on the absolutely stonking ‘Raw Sugar’. Coming on like a bouncy Jay Z track, Haines’ sings salaciously about “Don’t you like it on the sly/ Don’t you like it till it hurts” over a brilliantly funky drum machine. It’s perhaps the most of-its-time of the tracks here – it would be interesting trying to include the squelchy Wah Wah effects in today’s nu rave scene – but there’s no denying it’s a damn fun. ‘Hardwire’ could be a Cardigans track – breathy, thumping electro-pop that just doesn’t date (despite what you might think), and ‘On The Sly’ is an haunting, bittersweet pop ballad built around the refrain “I want them to hate me/ I don't feel so far away from you lately/ Let me love you on the sly.”
Compare this all to the band’s recent output, the Hole-referencing (both in title and in volume) ‘Live it Out’, and it makes their decision to go ‘rawk’ all the more bizarre. Sure, there are a few moments here that sound a little out of sync with the estuary-vowelled songstresses clogging up the airwaves at the moment, but this is a smart, sexy and classy pop album that has been treated badly by both its creators and its backers. And, c’mon, it’s nearly Christmas. Give a poor album a home. You won’t regret it, I promise.
