Metric
Memorial Hall - Chapel Hill
11/06/2013 08:00 PM EST
$25 - $28
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Supporting Acts: Flagship
Metric
In the early 2000's when Rock Was Back and every band in the world seemed to be looking for a wormhole to a 1970's garage, METRIC frontwoman Emily Haines was hauling around -- gasp! -- an analog synthesizer as the band worked their way up in New York City's clubs.
In the late 2000's, when many bands were being strangled by the industry's power structure, Metric undid all their business entanglements and started their own company, Metric Music International (MMI) with the help of independent managers Mathieu Drouin and Francoise de Grandpre.
Today, they're unencumbered and directly plugged into their listeners' hearts. With "Fantasies" single "Help I'm Alive," they became the first band in history to have their first ever Top 20 hit at U.S. commercial radio without the backing of a traditional label (a feat they repeated with "Gold Guns Girls"). They've since sold out arenas and headlined festivals. They've had a hand in scoring films for everyone from Edgar Wright to David Cronenberg, and they wrote the theme song for the "Twilight Saga: Eclipse" soundtrack with composer Howard Shore. They won Best Original Song for "Long To Live" (for Cronenberg's Cosmopolis) at the 2013 Canadian Screen Awards. They've even performed their song "Gimme Sympathy" at a private event for the Queen of England. For a band that had always been told they were Doing It Wrong, the Toronto-based quartet have grown into a fresh model for Making It Work.
If 2009's "Fantasies" was about escaping the familiar and exploring the world, "Synthetica" is about finding the courage to stay home and deal with your own reflection in the mirror. "It's about facing what you know is true," Haines says. The band -- Haines, Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott Key -- started work on the album literally the day after their final "Fantasies" show at the Art Basel modern art festival in Miami at the end of November 2010. They returned to Giant Studios in Toronto. They were emboldened by their fourth album's success (nearly 500,000 albums and over 1 million singles sold worldwide) and thinking big. But the real breakthrough came when pieces of vintage gear began fortuitously falling into their laps. Guitarist-producer Jimmy Shaw puts it this way, "'Synthetica' is the sonic culmination of everything we have done. We've always had a sound in our heads that we hoped to realize. We finally heard it coming out of the speakers this time. It's futuristic and synthesized, yet also organic." The album was mixed by long time METRIC collaborator and Grammy-nominated indie-rock specialist John O'Mahony at New York's famed Electric Lady Studios.
The first sound you hear on opening track "Artificial Nocturne" -- a pulsating, grimy throb -- returns as the anchor on gut-wrenching meditation "Dreams So Real" and hypnotic morality twister "Nothing But Time." According to Shaw, "That sound is the foundation of the album. Oddly enough, it's actually not a synthesizer. It's a '60s organ played through a homemade pedal dreamed up by a local wizard who posted an ad on Craiglist. Together they set the emotional tone of the record." First single "Youth Without Youth" tackles the fraying social state with a bristling energy. The song has become something of an early record-setter as "Youth Without Youth" debuted at #1 on the Canadian Mediabase Alternative Radio Chart, something no other artist has done. Ever. In the history of the chart. And it stayed at #1 for 18 weeks.
Haines first envisioned the word "Synthetica" as the name for a particularly resilient skin-job from Blade Runner, a female replicant who voices an inner monologue of all your human imperfections. "If you imagine a nightmarishly fake version of me as a pop star, that's her," she says. "And this record was about me saying, I'm going to give more to the music than ever, but there's no way I'm going to turn into someone like that." As she sings on the album's hard-rocking title track, "We're all the time confined to fit the mold / But I won't ever let them make a loser of my soul."
The release of "Synthetica" was as forward thinking as its grand sound and was globally self-released on the band's own label (MMI), in connection with a collection enhanced distribution and other joint venture partners the world over. Since it's release, "Synthetica" has won Alternative Album Of The Year, Producer Of The Year (James Shaw) and Recording Package Of The Year (Justin Broadbent) along with the band performing title track "Synthetica" live on 2103 JUNO Awards Broadcast. "Synthetica" has also been Short Listed for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize.
As Haines wrote in a letter to fans prior to the album release: "'Synthetica' is about insomnia, fucking up, fashion, all the devices and gadgets attached to our brains, getting wasted, watching people die in other countries, watching people die in your own country, dancing your ass off, questioning the cops, poetic justice, standing up for yourself, sex, the apocalypse, doing some stupid shit and totally regretting it but then telling everyone it made you stronger, leaving town as a solution to unsolvable problems, owning your actions, and owning your time." -- Caryn Ganz.
Venue Information
Memorial Hall - Chapel Hill
114 E. Cameron Avenue
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
https://www.carolinaperformingarts.org/ros_venue/memorial-hall/