Metric

In the last issue of the _Boar_ I wrote that only taking one support band on the road with you is a show of confidence. Now not having any support act at all, except for the dodgy old Kasbah DJ, is plain cocky. Fortunately Metric’s self-belief is far from being unfounded; tonight they show that they have every right to keep the show all to themselves. It’s not arrogance if you can deliver on it. Breaking the crowd in gently they kick off with ‘Twilight Galaxy’, the fourth track from their incredibly well received third album Fantasies, released at the end of April. Beginning with the soft heartbeat thud of a drum machine, this lullaby to dreaming gently swells until it fills the room, laced through with the (very-very-nearly-but-thankfully-not-quite-sickly) sweet vocals of Emily Haines.

Female vocalists are enjoying a burst of great success in the UK at the moment, with La Roux and Little Boots being the most hotly tipped indie acts for 2009, and Lily Allen and Lady Gaga spending extended periods of time at the top of the albums charts. It’s great to see women doing well in the music industry, but each of these four acts are heavily produced, marketed and made-up. Emily Haines isn’t a product; she’s a musician, and an artist. She doesn’t do costume changes or have her own personal hairdresser on hand at all times, and by the end of the show she looks just like a regular girl after some particularly enthusiastic dancing, maybe one too many cheap sambuca shots and perhaps a tumble down the stairs at Smack. It’s wonderful that there are so many female artists currently hitting the number one spot, in terms of both singles and albums, but it would be even better if more of these role models and heroines were real people like Haines, rather than a glossy image constructed by a PR company.

Metric run through almost every track from Fantasies, not leaving room for much older material, although ‘Monster Hospital’, a single from previous album Live It Out, and ‘Dead Disco’, from debut Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, are given an airing in the encore. The only thing that slightly marred the band’s strong performance was a little too much spoken-word rambling. After waiting hours to see a band play live, the last thing you want is to have the music masked by a constant flow of disjointed and unconnected statements such as ‘There’s nothing better than a sedate and indifferent generation…’. The sugary girlishness of Haines’ voice is what stops this diatribe from becoming unbearable: it’s possible to not take in the gravity of what she is saying, which, I suppose, makes it all the more effective when you do think about it.

On the whole, I’m happy to have a little political ranting along with my live music, because it proves that that music and the ideas behind it come from the artist’s own mind, that they take in and react to what is going on in the world around them, rather than just being some record label’s performing monkey.