Metric: Grow Up and Blow Away

Metric
Grow Up and Blow Away
Last Gang

As another entrant in the category of new music that isn’t exactly new, Emily Haines and her Metric brohams have dusted off their overlooked, out-of-print 1999 debut, Grow Up and Blow Away, complete with the usual repackaging, re-mastering, and remixes.

Unlike most indie rock archeological digs, however, these ancient songs don’t showcase the established band in a state of adorable cluelessness. Instead, Grow Up and Blow Away sounds like a band that already has its shit together, with a smart, slick style that compares favorably to Metric’s later power-pop material, while also hinting at the darker avenues that Haines eventually explored on her 2006 solo album.

If there’s a strange twist, it might be found in tracks like the appropriately named “The Twist” and “Raw Sugar,” which induce dancing more in an old school Nelly Furtado sort of way than a Yeah Yeah Yeahs sort of way. In truth, the whole album does bear a bit of a blue-eyed R&B aesthetic, with Haines’ piano playing and fluttery soprano adding depth to the synthy club rhythms around her. It’s a dynamic quite remindful of that underappreciated Swedish outfit The Cardigans, but in the context of Metric’s later developments, the comparison feels more like a coincidence.

The record’s true highlight remains its lost gem of a title track, which features Haines’ chilly delivery of the line, “If this is the life, why does it feel so good to die today?” Oddly enough, this song first saw the light of day six years ago in a TV commercial for Polaroid. Are you taking notes, Bishop Allen?

(Andrew Clayman)


Published in The Metro Pulse, July 2007