Metric – Fantasies
PURCHASE: iTunes ($9.99) | AmazonMP3 ($5.00)
I’m a little ashamed to say I’d never heard Metric until just a couple of weeks ago. The name of the band gets thrown around in conversation all the time, although never by me, and it’s generally thrown in my direction along with other bands I pretend to have heard. Like Placebo. Go ahead and laugh at the jerk who never heard Metric. When you’re done laughing, I’m going to punch you in the face and tell you how rich I am. It will be a soft punch and I’m actually quite poor.
In 1992 I was 14 years old and attending high school in the small town of Oakland, NJ. I will refer to this time as “back in my day” when describing it to my grandchildren. At this point in my life, I was freebasing cassette tapes. There was a small group of kids in my school that were immersed in the alternative rock scene and, in retrospect, were probably one or two genes away from shooting up the place. It was during this phase that I first heard Pod by The Breeders, which was recommended to me by a female alterna-friend who made her own miniature pottery and sold it to kids at school. Yes, the kids actually paid for this pottery.
There was something about Kim Deal’s voice and her lyrics on the Pod record that interested me. I needed to know what she looked like, who she was and where she came from. Since this was before the internet was widely in use, I had to find pictures and information by visiting record stores to thumb through the magazines. At one point I made a visit to the library to search their archives and find out as much as I could. Needless to say, the Oakland Public Library didn’t have much.
The first time I heard Metric’s new album Fantasies, I decided not to look at the band. I resisted the urge to Google them, and have avoided reading articles with detailed information or photos. It’s become so easy to get information about a band and a lot of the mystique is gone. There’s something about Metric that makes me want to file their record along with the cassettes and CDs from my high school days, and I’d like to keep the information overload at bay so I can be left alone with the music.
Watch the video for “Sick Mise” below:
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