When Metric’s last album, Pagans in Vegas, came out in 2015, the band had decided to go full-tilt alt-rock as opposed to peppering their sound with the usual amount of electronic beats that had colored so much of their previous work, especially 2005’s Live It Out, which launched them into the mainstream thanks to “Monster Hospital.” While the quartet has flirted with varying sounds over the years (especially Haines, who has broken out on her own in Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton, as well as her various reappearances in Broken Social Scene), they veered dangerously too far away from the electronic milieu after 2012’s Synthetica–the sound that has worked so well for them every time.
With their seventh album, Art of Doubt, released over the course of a career spanning fifteen years, it’s evident that Metric has had enough time to see what works best for them and what doesn’t. Thus, the combined forces of Haines, Joules Scott-Key, James Shaw and Joshua Winstead seamlessly blend the best elements of what they’ve done from a pure alternative guitar and bass standpoint, as well as, most importantly, an electronic one.
Segueing from the more straightforward in its “alt-ness” opener, “Dark Saturday,” the video of which features the theme of aloneness without the ones who understand you tied together by the thread of a postcard, “Love You Back” sets the tone of electropop for a large duration of the album, with Haines ruing, “I wanna love you back so bad/You’re everyone I never had.” And who among us has not felt exactly the same after wasting the fever pitch of our ability to love on the wrong person, only to find someone more capable of reciprocity after it’s already too late and your heart has been too much beaten to a pulp. Elsewhere, Haines, from her perch of sageness, warns us, “When you’ve got no time/You’re gonna want it back/You’re gonna want it badly.” Yes, must she always be so poignant?
“Die Happy,” too, keeps it just the perfect amount of electro meets indie (Canadian) rock with the interwoven 80s beats that punctuate Haines “happily” sing-asking, “Is this dystopia?” The answer, of course, is a resounding yes (just see both encounters between the Orange One and Kim Kardashian and the Orange One and Kanye West respectively–despite all three involved having zero respect for sustaining any amount of governmental integrity).
Following is one of the most standout for the sheer 80sness of it: the third single from the album, “Now or Never Now.” Harkening back to the hopeful whimsy of tracks like “Twilight Galaxy” and “Gimme Sympathy” from 2009’s Fantasies, Haines explores a familiar topic from the Metric breadth of work: feeling as though one has no sense of place, nor sense of self. Lamenting, “My life is on pause/It’s out of my hands/To perfectly perform in reverse/There’s no way to rehearse,” Haines accents the plight increasingly common to even the non-youthful person–for adulthood feels evermore like a quaint myth we can only read about in Richard Yates novels. To drive her lost at seaness fully home, she surrenders, “Oh, only silence can restore/The sense of place I had before/Oh, only silence can repair/My sense of self I lost somewhere.” Alas, silence truly is more of a commodity than gold–especially since people have no idea how to use it when they finally (and rarely) do get it to harness their inner power so as to choose the path that’s right for them.
Allowing Haines to pay one of the greatest homages she ever has to “girl rock” (think: Bikini Kill at those certain moments when she screams in a rage), “Art of Doubt” offers echoes of the auditory structure of “Monster Hospital” as Haines gets poetic with the mention of, “Springtime, the vespers chime/Blossoms fill the trees that line the high road.” And Haines is all too aware that’s it’s a harder road to take than ever in these lawless times, cursing humanity, “Well, it’s magical, your meaningless/Habitual, mundane excess/At its best it’s all the art of doubt.” For who could blame us for entering every endeavor having perfected the sentiment based on all the lies we’ve so happily been sold?
Opening with an electric guitar riff that would make The Smashing Pumpkins proud, “Underline the Black” again underlines the notion of displacement hit upon in “Now Or Never Now,” with Haines telling herself, “I’m not sorry, I don’t think of you that often.” And yet, the undisguised fact of the matter is that the loss of someone she once loved has forced her to reconsider herself as a single being once more–yet not quite the same person she was before she became “a unit,” hence grieving, “How can I explain, that feeling remains/When I looked at myself, I was somebody else,” in between the no longer cathartic process of applying makeup/armor that finds her, “underlin[ing] the black around my eyes in the dark with heavy chains over [her] heart.” And, like so many of us living in the age of disinformation, she finds, “I just look, don’t feel like myself at all/And I’m just waiting for the axe to fall.”
This constant feeling of dread, however, is something we’re expected to simply ignore in going about our daily lives and relationships as though we’re not being torn apart inside emotionally (even worse than Tommy Wiseau as Johnny in The Room). So it is addressed in “Dressed to Suppress,” which essentially is the anti-“Unloveable” by The Smiths in that Morrissey proudly declares his mood with his clothes by announcing, “I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside.” Conversely, Haines, through the lens of marriage metaphor, discusses the complex relationship she has with wanting to perform and please her listeners while also feeling extremely insecure, remarking of her situation, “Her beauty is a form of charity/Dressed to suppress all kinds of sorrow.” So it is that Haines once more, as she often does in her songwriting, conjures the image of the prostitute/singer, commenting, “Long before my fall from grace/For a piece of me they paid.” Which is to say that, through every peak and valley of success, she has given all of herself to the audience for the cash. It’s rather like a lyric from “Soft Rock Star,” from their third (but technically first) record, Grow Up and Blow Away, on which Haines shrugs, “Choose the highest bidder was my answer when they told me I was up for sale.” And so she has, even if it means suppressing her more than occasional discontent over it.
The appropriately subsequent “Risk” finds Haines ever incapable of hiding just how much of an eternal optimist she is (after all, that’s what they say all pessimists are beneath their gruff, fatalist exterior). So she can’t help but encourage, even through all of her blatantly paraded dismay on Art of Doubt, “So you’re beaten up/But you bounce back/It’s all part of the pull/And the story runs like a soundtrack/We repeat ’til we’re full.” Some of us get a little bit fuller than others much sooner. Just ask the suicide club of 2018.
On the laidback and less electro than the first half of the album “Seven Rules,” Haines reassumes her more fatalistic bent with, “Come on, angel/Come and save us/Let me see sunrise/Give me something.” In fact, the majority of Art of Doubt seems to be an open call prayer for some higher power, any higher power, to help a bitch out. I mean, Christ, it used to be you read nothing about divine intervention once a human being went through enough struggle, now it’s, “Oh yeah, she died of trying too hard slash a broken heart.”
Veering evermore back to the more alternative side of the band’s personality as the album draws to a close, “Holding Out” is another examination of indecision and its ramifications, with Haines realizing that there’s never a “right time” to hold out for. It’s now or never now, in short. So it is that she cautions those who still have more time, Holding out for the right time/My whole lifetime slowly goes by/Always waiting on the sidelines/When is it my time/To be the one, the one, the one?” One supposes she’s saying: whenever you want it to be. That’s when your time is.
Again nailing it with the transition from one title of a song to another, “Anticipate” goes back to the sound machine vibes of the first half of the record, which is all an homage to Fantasies, sonically. One of the most memorable songs for its lulling yet upbeat nature, Haines can’t help continuing to ruminate on the comfortableness of failure in an age that is so mediocre, “What did you plan?/What did you anticipate?/All you demand to find/Spiraling down, falling behind/No tomorrow.” And so often, based on the news cycle alone, that is what it feels like: no tomorrow. So they conclude most fittingly with “No Lights On the Horizon,” a slowed down, melancholy offering (as something with such a title ought to be). Again providing a sense of doom and gloom for the age, Haines also tempers her sorrow with the idea that maybe she is capable of loving again–or despite the fact that every day feels like apocalypse now, noting, “The past, it isn’t far away/In spite of all of us, it’s here to stay/I’m more than able to follow through/Just not for everyone/Maybe just for you.” And whoever that “just for you” person is, the one that makes it all faintly worthwhile, Haines proves that the simplest amount of kindness from even one person can make all the difference in pushing one to get through (obviously, just look at Hannah Baker in Thirteen Reasons Why). Hence she somewhat thanks, “If it wasn’t for your kindness lately, I’d never get out of bed.”
While Metric still can’t help themselves in terms of their eventual “indie rock” leanings as the album progresses, the strong electronic start is what makes one believe the band will always know where their strongest suit lies. Even in this “end of days” era.
