SOUNDTRACK: METRIC-Live at the 9:30 Club, June 18, 2009 (2009).
I love the new Metric album and this tour supported that disc, so, it’s a win-win for me! Metric sound great live, and the notes on the NPR page where I downloaded this give a fascinating history of the band. Evidently they burnt out in 2005 while touring for Live It Out. So they made solo records and kind of went their separate ways. Then:
in March 2008, Haines was on stage, in the middle of a live solo performance, when she had an epiphany: She was tired of being sad. While playing one of the standout cuts from her gloomy but beautiful album Knives Don’t Have Your Back, Haines stopped, turned to the audience and said, “I don’t want to play these songs anymore.” Instead, she spent the rest of the show performing her favorite Metric tunes.
The band reunited and made Fantasies, the poptastic album that I love so much.
This show plays pretty much all of the album (except “Collect Call” and “Blindness”) and they rock the house! The only odd part for me is the opening track, “Satellite Mind.” The band chose to have the first half of the song performed with just the keyboards, so it has no bottom end at all. It sounds kind of tinny and weird. Then when the guitars and bass kick in (for the rest of the show, thankfully), the band sounds whole again.
The other weird thing is Emily Haines’ banter. I like chatty lead singers (–The Swell Season’s banter is great, Wayne Coyne’s banter is emotional but enjoyable), but there’s something about Haines’ musing that are just kind of…lame. She’s very earnest, but her thoughts are kind of, well, vapid. So, I just skip past all the chatter and enjoy the music.
It’s a really great, rocking set and the crowd is very into it.
[READ: August 25, 2011] Atlas of Remote Islands
If you need an unusual but doubtlessly cool book, my brother-in-law Ben is your man. For my birthday and Christmases he often gets me books that I have never heard of but that are weird and interesting.
This book is no exception. As the subtitle states, this is a book about fifty remote islands that virtually no one lives on. True, some are inhabited, but many are not. And a goodly amount of them are little more than icebergs (I wonder how they will survive global warming). There’s even one that the accompanying story implies was created from bird droppings. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 