Today We'll Be Working Your Glutes, Your Abs, Your Futility (Metric, Terminal 5, 6-17-09)

(photo via christheobscure's Flickr)

I no longer want to fuck Emily Haines.

Metric - Gimme Sympathy (mp3)(buy Fantasies)

The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?  Oh Emily come on.  Who are you now?  My dad(*)?  The Grammy Awards?

You and me, Em, we've gotten old and maybe a little wise and oh so dull.

Metric (myspace) released its fourth album Fantasies this past April and it is candy, their most consistently listenable and least engaging work.  The urge to reconcile gooey insides with hard shell leads to sweet licks with no crunch.  Its dimmed bulb wrapper seems a negotiated surrender, the record reeks of practical ambitions.  It's a substantive switch from the resentful retreat that Emily Haines' fiery inner idealist used to make behind asbestos exterior, spitting sighs and cooing condemnations at the unchangeable Other.  Those were the fantasies, how could you not fall in lust?

Metric - Succexy (mp3)(buy Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?)

Ass, ass, ass.  God, do you remember the war?  What good times those were?

Haines (with partner Jimmy Shaw, whom I don't mention as much because I've never wanted to fuck him) illustrates the failings of the information era, piling juicy fractured potshots on shifting sands of broadcast blurt, driving a dominant message through with catchy chorus.  The ability to glutton on choices absolves us of the responsibility of making them.  Looking up at the end of a catwalk from an easy chair with a channel changer, war is just another faddish option, one we can be sold on the same way as we're drawn to any other product.  Short skirts, promises of popularity, assurances of missions accomplished.

One of the things Haines did so well on 2003's barbed wire-laced Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? and 2005's Live it Out was take up half-considered attacks on easy-but-necessary targets - war, sexual politics, capitalism - with abandon, then abandon them.  From "IOU:" "Every ten-year-old enemy soldier thinks falling bombs are shooting stars sometimes but she doesn't make wishes on them.  When she wishes, she wishes for less ways to wish for, more ways to work toward it."  It's vivid enough to pass along concerns, it's maddening that they never cohere, and when she shrugs the whole thing off, it's incredibly sexy.  It also complements their simply sectioned music, which isn't so much loud-soft-loud as cold-hot-cold.

Metric - Hand$hake$ (mp3)(buy Live it Out)

Little girl has something to say about the big big world.  By playing fickle and naïve, she summons a casual boldness that can get at truths measured and mature arguments cannot.  "Hand$hake$" is one of my favorite Metric songs, and I don't even think anything in the first half sticks.  Maybe the sirens.  It gets going when it stops and thuds out its incomplete argument.  "Buy a car to drive to work.  Drive to work to pay for this car."  I know you can, duh, drive your car other places too.  But it's an easy illustration of how a cycle of consumption can suck life into one long tail-chase.

(Another thing Haines does so well is drag down exclamatory stuff - "bop-a-da-das," "la la la las," "yeah yeah yeahs" - with fear and/or sadness and/or sarcasm.  Again, sexy!)

The band went on break after Live it Out; its unreleased first album, Grow Up and Blow Away, came without touring support in 2007.  Haines released a solo record that seemed designed for intimacy (her backing band was called The Soft Skeleton).  Some of it was intimate - "Winning" is a thing of beauty, simple and honest and generous - some of it still addressed societal concerns (the scale making the politics of domestic life, over-reliance on mediation, etc. more personal).  When I saw her perform at Joe's Pub against a backdrop of recut Guy Maddin clips she was less chatty than she gets with her big band, and though the songs were sad and sometimes angry she seemed content.

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"Some of us just have to be exactly who we are."

Eight of the first nine songs Metric played at Terminal 5 came from Fantasies, and the set started with a promising fake out.  "Twilight Galaxy," one of the record's more contained numbers, was given a Theremin-noodling intro from Shaw and a lengthy coda filled with hot bursts and cold pauses.  Haines' vocals were dramatically distorted, but impressively present given the cavernous venue.  As she echoed, "Keep doing it wrong, keep singing along," it seemed like the band had found a way to graft some tension on to its hollow new material.

That didn't last long.  The effort was there, Haines bounced around in a wifebeater and a pair of black jeans with a pair of surgical cuts at its knee.  She posed and sweated and smiled a lot.  The band sounded professional (though Haines had trouble getting near the notes on "Sick Muse"), looked like they enjoyed what they were doing.  Probably more than they should have.  The very deliberate beats and patient hooks were so straightforward they never took on a second dimension.

The few old songs they treated us to brought depth of attitude.  "Empty" was vicious.  Haines still does the same hands-on-hips headshake, but however rehearsed her tirades may be, repeatedly screaming, "The world doesn't owe you shit!" at the audience is brave stuff, these days.  She followed with a tirade on how given "a whole world of ideas," some people just got "on the highway" or craved "a little life off to the side with your friends."  She spat the word "friends" out with such contempt I wanted to crawl up and kiss her right there.

She either underlined or undermined "Dead Disco" by following its final lines - "I know you tried to change things" - with the words, "Sad but true, sad but true."

And so, "Gimme Sympathy," which cites some dead rock and roll (even the song's central argument is outdated, people just hit "Download All" and put their shit on shuffle) while ignoring its own advice ("stay away from the hooks, all the chances we took," she sings as the song veers sonically toward "Mr. Brightside").  "Sympathy's" genesis, Haines told us, was the subway ride the band took together from Brooklyn to Madison Square Garden in 2006 when they opened for The Rolling Stones.  It's not the first time Haines has lyrically dropped the Stones - "Paint it Black" appeared in "Combat Baby"...  but this whole song's an alarmingly useless, purely circumstantial reference.  Unless you consider the backstory's destination.

The new record closes with a track called "Stadium Love," and Haines introduced it last night as "a national anthem" for the dual-citizenship band, one born from a post-apocalyptic dream she had about cheetahs and cheeseburgers and shit.  Whatever.  It reads like a mission statement, like the band wants big spaces and mucho adoration (Haines would ask for a show of lighters and cell phones during last night's encore).  It sounds just like you'd think any song called "Stadium Love" would - oversized, mechanical.  It's the aural equivalent of a movie that Steven Spielberg produced but didn't direct.  It's *batteries not included or Transformers or some shit like that.  Fantasies' songs are skin and frame, they don't have the muscle or curves or soul.  There's nothing to want to fuck, nevermind anything with which to fall in love.

(*) It is amusing that Metric and Art Brut both stumble over the same references, and how they warp them to their particular needs.  Respective takes on Bobby Fuller:  "I fought the war and the war won!"/"I fought the floor and the floor won."

Also there:  BrooklynVegan, Dry Paint Signs, fend magazine, Get Glucky, Little to Contribute, Love Schack, Misty Boyce, Papermag, What Did We Do Before Chucks?

And hey, the Bowery Presents people have their own blog now.

And and hey:  It looks like the band is on a new Craig Ferguson tonight.  Wonder when they taped that one?

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Now that Haines has dead space where her venom sack used to be, who's gonna hawk some tuneful spitballs at The Man?  Why not Ollie Stone and her Oohlas (myspace)?

The Oohlas - Lemmings Anthem (mp3)(buy)

The Angelino outfit dropped full-length Best Stop Pop in 2006 to not enough acclaim.  Earlier this year they snuck out their Chinchilla EP; the BPMs are up, Stone - who shared vocals with bassist Mark Eklund on Pop - is fully in front, their 90s Alternative Nation sound (think: Belly) is fuller and angsted out.  All four songs are winners, which makes the thing feel unfairly short.  New album soon please?

You could argue that the timing's wrong for the whole Let's Mock People Who Actually Have Jobs thing, and Ollie's really railing against irresponsibility and lock-step thoughtlessness.  But there are fewer people who have jobs than there have been for decades!  Their numbers are down!  Attack!  Attack!

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Moon (trailer) is a solid little science fiction film, resists being overwhelmed by effects or bombast.  Starts off echoing Silent Running and 2001, finds its own niche.  Fine use of emoticons!  It might run out of ideas a little soon, and might not summon up the sympathy it needs to finish, but worth at least a rent.

This was among the coming attractions and looks awesome:

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"Including a shot of John Turturro in a G-string."  Too much meets the eye!   Too much meets the eye!

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No one other than Joe Mantegna should provide the voice for the titular character.

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What #iranelection has taught us about Twitter:  People who are actually experiencing something important can use the technology to communicate it, people who are not experiencing anything but the technology can use the technology to congratulate themselves for having the technology.  Or for watching Phish.  #interestingamericanfail

Though I can't help thinking that "Twittering Iranians" has to be a smaller niche group than Animal Collective Bros.

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This WSJ story about the Sufjan Stevens listening party is basically this Village Voice story about the Sufjan Stevens listening party, only four months late.

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"Crowd-sourcing killed punk rock."

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If Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma (via)

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"Gene Simmons begins to weep silently while rubbing his crotch."

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OMG Matthew Fluxblog raped Tiny Masters of Today with his pen!

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"I can't help taking brief note of an important, startling, and subtly trangressive art installation that is currently on view in the middle of Times Square. It is called What the Hell Are Those Lawn Chairs Doing in the Middle of Times Square, and the artist is a promising neophyte named Mike Bloomberg, aka "His Honor." Bloomberg has already drawn notice for works such as Three Bankrupt Banks on Every Block and Eurotrash Condo Towers Everywhere. If public acclaim continues to mount, he might be able to give up his day job."

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