Album Review

Metric – Synthetica

• 27th Jun 2012

Although Synthetica is Metric’s fifth full length album, it may well have felt to the Canadian quartet that they were producing their second. While they’ve certainly never been short of admirers, their 2009 long player Fantasies catapulted them properly into the mainstream; resultantly the next would provide a whole different challenge. It seems as if the mission is one they’ve accepted. Put this next to 2007’s (but recorded in 2001) Grow Up and Blow Away and the difference is stark. One is clearly an unpolished but occasionally charming act operating at the margins, the other the confident output of a band which is all too aware that it will be taking possession of some FM real estate.

Sadly, without wanting to unfairly privilege the marginal, the latter stands as the poor relation. Synthetica, from start to finish, is really a matter of polish over inspiration. Even style over substance would imply a certain Don Draperesque charm that doesn’t seem appropriate here. In isolation, there are things to be enjoyed; moments of sparkling texture, the urgency of some of the higher tempo pieces.

But step back and it all seems a bit soulless, a bit – with apologies – synthetic. There’s something of the joyless heavier music of the early 2000s about it, an over-sincere over-buffed bloated swagger-by-numbers. Anger paradoxically rendered a commodity. ‘Bigger’ songs like lead single “Youth Without Youth” and “Breathing Underwater” (which sounds like it belongs over a football-team-being-eliminated montage), sound somehow uniform; the band’s trademark synths sounding drab and the choruses barely registering.

Chorus almost feels like a misnomer actually, with its etymological suggestion of collectivity. These choruses – these songs we should say – are all really about Emily Haines. And indeed, with all due respect to the other three musicians, she is very much the nexus of the band too. This is foregrounded by the lyrical content of Synthetica. Outside of some of the more solipsistic literary traditions, you’ll struggle to come across more instances of the word ‘I’ than on this album.

While she gives it large on the press junket about anti-consumerism and big, albeit trite, themes of falseness and truth, many of her lyrics just come across like the hormonal bedrooms scratchings of a teenager. “Everyone not dying is dead,” indeed. “I’m fucked up as they say,” is it? How’s that for an opening line? Fittingly, in “Dreams So Real”, Haines asks “Have I have ever really helped anybody but myself believe in the power of songs?” Not when they sound like this you haven’t!

Confusingly, Lou Reed turns up for a duet penultimate track “Wanderlust”. Odd, and on at least one occasion, when he sings the song’s title refrain with a bit too much enthusiasm, kind of funny. But fair enough, if you can get Lou Reed to do a spot on your album, you must be doing something right.

Actually, in the interests of balance, it really should be pointed out that there are some earworms on this album, and it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that a lot of people will like this. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the masses went for something by turns bland and overwrought, would it? Though, in fairness, that’s an art in itself – but the numbers aren’t even in yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet…