A reason to convert to Metric...

Sometime last winter after hearing a snippet of a song on The Andy Langer Show podcast, I picked up the solo debut release of Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton entitled Knives Don't Have Your Back. It's a relatively naked album, stripped down to the velvety beautiful voice of Haines and her piano skills with some subtle drum backup, occasional string arrangements, and a bass guitar--a great CD to just lie around and chill out to. The lyrics are at times depressing, often soothing, and always intriguing.

When not engaged in this side project of hers, Emily Haines fronts the Canadian indie rock band Metric. I seemed to have run across favorable bits here and there about the band in various press articles, but never really listened to much of their music, other than a concert video I happened to watch on a Frontier Airlines flight. Unfortunately for me, I was more distracted by the turbulence to actually enjoy what I was watching of the band's performance. The critics seem to really like them, and apparently, a couple of their songs have even made it into the current pipeline of "hipster" music that is the television soundtrack to Grey's Anatomy. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been giving their most recent release, Grow Up and Blow Away, quite a bit of play, and I have to say it's pretty darn good. Completely different from her solo effort, Haines' vocals still have quite some presence in a more up-tempo and rock-based sound scape. The songs are somewhat pop with an edge and a definite indie vibe, tunes that aren't too catchy to grab you on the first listen, but definitely improve with repeated listenings--just the way I like it.

Strangely, I found out after reading about this album on the internet, that Grow Up and Blow Away was actually supposed to be Metric's debut release when it was recorded back in 1999. It sort of got lost in the chaos of an emerging band shuffling between music labels, and never got released until this summer. Lucky for me, though, as now I can listen to the rest of their albums in chronological order as if I just discovered them, and hear how their musical style grows with age--cool.