Music Monday with PLC is a weekly feature written by my husband, Pat.
Find out the back story + check out the full archives HERE .
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Metric
[photo by jennifer; review by pat]
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It was sometime in the late 70’s, I remember President Carter and my teacher saying that the United States of America and my class were going to have to learn the metric system and convert to fall in line with the rest of the world. It is at this point in our country’s history that you could almost see the giant red white and blue middle finger being inflated and pointed directly across the Atlantic at Europe. It seems that the rest of the world grossly underestimated our good old American stubbornness (and maybe a little laziness too). These colors do not run, and they do not measure in centimeters or liters either. And to this day kids, the United States is the only industrialized country that does not use the metric system as its official system of measurement. And they all lived happily ever after.
Metric is a band originally out of Toronto, Ontario Canada (although they have spent much time in metric and non-metric cities alike), and they have just released their fifth album Synthetica (Metric Music International). The band’s sound has a great mix of keyboard, guitar, and tight drum machine sounding drumming. Imagine if The Killers listened to more Garbage and less Stone Temple Pilots. Or if Muse was cool.
Check out their video for the first single (which is unfortunately not one of their strongest songs) “Youth Without Youth” -
Metric is really the product of promises that New Wave’s first wave made to us in the early 80’s, like a robot with a heart (or like the Vision, for all you comic book geeks out there). Emily Haines is a knockout front woman, and really does a good job turning a phrase. She explains Synthetica as, “about being able to identify the original in a long line of reproductions. It's about what is real vs what is artificial."
Here they are real and live doing the title track -
All this, and they really use some creative visuals and mirror image graphics in the digital download booklet and cd to give you something cool to look at while listening. The United States may finally go Metric after all.
- PLC
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MORE:
- last week - Haim
- last month - Alabama Shakes
- last season - Company of Thieves
- full archive of Music Monday with PLC - HERE
