Looking Back On Metric's Debut Album, Old World Underground Where Are You Now?
The album name is too long for a clever headline, but Mertic’s First LP Has Aged Beautifully
Tristan Young @talltristan
Emily Haines clears her throat at the beginning of IOU, the opening track of Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? Despite the ambiguous vocal inflection, it conveys much about her rhetorical position at the start of Metric’s debut LP. She is nervous, perhaps a touch reversed. “Hesitation is always mine”, she ruefully admits. Pushing against her own taciturn obstinacies, she forces out, not with booming oration, but slightly quivering determination the central question of the album, “old world underground, where are you now?” What the hell happened, in other words. How the hell did this happen? Her rhetorical posturing is still inchoate, not fully developed, hence the resignation in her voice. Her lexical grasp or cultural acumen is that of a neophyte dissident, not fully observant yet of the big picture or all the interstitial fibres that connect everything together. Yet what she is cognizant of troubles her deeply. With that throat clear, she tacitly acknowledges that her sentiments may lack a certain philosophical sophistication, but the frailty in her litigious bent will be enforced by her resolve. This is the starkly meritorious value of Old World Underground. In its proletarian simplicity it achieves a moral clarity. Knowing full well they don’t have the means to mitigate the injustices of the world, the enormity of such they still struggle to gasp, they determinedly try anyway. Rather than an elaborate and byzantine document of all the world’s ills, Haines and her cohorts simply tried to come to terms with them. In doing so it has earned its historical context and proven refreshingly ahead of its time.
For two decades Metric has been something of a standard bearer of overlapping rock constituencies. They have cultivated a comfortable, if procedural, arena of disaffected indie rock in the vein of the final metamorphosis from late 90s alt, glitzy avant garde-rock, and straight up congenial radio fare. Each subsequent album has calcified their systems and output along terms that have grown both more rigid and also less sharply defined with time. In their earliest days however, Metric was more primordial, less assured of their place in cannon or zeitgeist. That gave them tension and provided stakes that would prove vital for forming their atmospherics. The general millennial economic immiserations that young adults of their era faced was a key formative factor as well. Lead singer Haines, who was born in India but grew up in Ontario, migrated with her band mates to Brooklyn to live the dream of the professional starving artist. They even shared a flat with members of TV On The Radio and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs at points, as if the borough wasn’t the biblical cradle of enough genres throughout history already. As the ironic glamor of destitute hipster chic started to dim, Haines and the team relocated to London, and then to LA to record their debut LP.
Old World Underground was released in 2003, at the pinnacle of post 9/11 opportunism in the political and cultural theaters. Millennials, their previous and most recent interaction with the politics of morality spilling into their domestic lives being the sexual inanity of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, were not well equipped to deal with it all. Just as a generation was learning to pay attention, the stakes were so much more dire. A paranoid and authoritarian nation state was materializing into adolescence under not only our very eyes but also under the auspices of ‘security’. Generations of foreign adventurism in the name of colonial arrogance masqueraded as vital frontlines in the defence of our liberty. Our liberty was of course a term that had grown more and more abstract as our fears for our material freedom were annexed by fears of our economic opportunity- or lack thereof- and growing cultural disequilibrium among the shifting demographics. The frivolity of our pop culture appetites seemed more and more disconnected from the anathematized reality of the market room bros trying to come up with catchy names for carpet bombing Afghan and Iraqi villages so it would sound cool. And yet we ate it all up. Haines and the rest of Metric wanted to be successful musicians, but did they really want to be part of this ecosystem?
This is the background and the terms for writing and recording Old World Underground, an album that is unapologetically cynical as hell. In the sunken and morose delivery of Haines’ voice, in the desensitized and undeterred efficiency of Joules Scott-Key’s percussion, in the searing anger burned into James Shaw’s guitar during the intro of Dead Disco, and in the indignant condemnation encoded in so much of the synth throughout the album. It’s introverted, angry, tired, frustrated, suspicious, and pessimistic. It wants to be, it’s trying to be, even in the face of opportunities to peruse something better- for as long as it can at least. To paraphrase Haines early in the album, it is looking for less things to wish for. Haines rants with either a postmodern stoicism or a forlorn and dreadful conclusion against the military industrial complex in Succexy, sarcastically boasting, “let’s drink to the military, the glass is empty”. Later on she bemoans, “war as we know it was obsolete, nothing could beat complete denial”. She rails against the cultural dead ends of late stage consumer capitalism in the fiery banger Dead Disco, lecturing “Need less, use less, we’re asking for too much I guess”. In Hustle Rose and The List she intersects the blissful ignorance of carefree indulgences- because what else is there to do- with the grave immorality of our economic and judicial systems, lamenting that they too have succumbed to such diversions, “the blondes are smiling behind us, saying one day you’ll be just like us”. Even without specific targets to direct her opprobrium, Haines sounds appropriately deflated by, well, everything. “Smells like the death of the last great cause”, she opens in The List. Part of the appeal of her poetic lyricism is she often contrasts it with clear cut transparency as opposed to literary intrigue or nuance. It results in refreshingly succinct communication on her part, such as in IOU when loath to admit her isolation she vents, “wound up in a movie with no story, now it’s late and you’re nowhere to be found”.
Not everything she says has the same streamlined efficacy. In The List she promises with a naïve certitude they will never sell out from their indie nerd core dynamic, “who we are we will always be, the best hair cuts are taken”. The modern day outcome of such prophetics is debateable but the line still inspires a groan. Despite this, much of what Haines argued about back then, even in somewhat undercooked terms by her own design, was quite prescient. Her thoughts jump from the cynical nature of the war on terror as she ponders the fate of child soldiers a world away, only to then malign the avarice and complacency of the fashion industry in Succexy, “follow the patterns, the headlines, the hemlines”. It’s all a bit scatter shot at times and may come off like the snivelling bloviating of liberal art school pretention back in 2003. But Haines was largely correct about the trajectory of much of her invectives a generation later. What seemed like hyperbolic hysteria then is chillingly on point now. Rather than radical, it was merely ahead of the curve. When confronting such morally onerous fixtures in daily life, they nail the sense of dreary hopelessness. In Calculation Theme Haines softly swoons, “I’m sick you’re tired, let’s dance”. In Dead Disco she frantically begs, “I know you tried to change things, I know”. Haines seems aware that the best she can do isn’t good enough but, again, what else is there to do?
This ideological cynicism is encoded into the firmaments of the album, beyond Haines’ own vitriol. The coquettish nocturne of the guitar during On A Slow Night acts as an allusion for something akin to a vile sludge under a disinfectant light. The queasy grind of the synth in Dead Disco conveys demoralization and proverbial hands thrown up in the air in angst aptly. The disaffected malaise of the sequencers in Succexy charts its path with nonchalant shrugs that just happened to be very danceable. The granular decay of guitar and synth grinding against each other in Hustle Rose implies an untenable dynamic, as if none of this can last in its current form. No wonder she speaks of being numb to it all throughout the track. The deadpan anarchism of the scattered and slightly incoherent pianos in IOU is evocative of a PTSD system shock in its come down phase. It’s appropriate that the song morphs into a lullaby for child soldiers.
In her writing Haines seems, on a subtextual level, aware that the enormity and complexity of these malignant systems are beyond her rhetorical scope for the most part. Rather than dissecting and interrogating these systems to their core, she intimates her point often with simple rhetorical questions to great effect. The opening line, “old world underground, where are you now?” in IOU primes us to question our surroundings and context even if we’re not quite sure on what terms. In the devilishly seductive vibe in of On A Slow Night, she inquires, “tell me, what did that salesman do to you?” Her ponderances grow more macro and outlandish in The List, but her delivery matches the escalation as she theatrically asks, “Do lawyers have lawyers? Do landlords have landlords?” Haines clearly doesn’t have much in the way of answers, but injecting a little reflective discomfort into the system may be as much pain as she can inflict. She seems almost pleased to do it at times.
This simplicity in Haines lyrics serves other crucial purposes. She writes in decidedly plaintive ways, which effectively situates her in contrast to the pernicious institutions- upper class vulture capitalists, superficial fashion, military exploitation- that she would admonish. She flees from the grandiose and superlative oration they employ to impart pomp and circumstance to their ideological or cultural fetishes. However the album isn’t entirely devoid of such luxuries, rather they are used sparingly. When she does articulate in more elaborate and embellished forms, she does so in an abstract and observational tense, to remarkable proficiency. In a vibrant and twinkling aside, Haines looks for a connection between our own cultural miasma and that of the nations we vilify, “every ten year old enemy soldier thinks falling bombs are shooting stars sometimes/ but she doesn’t make wishes on them.” They’re our falling bombs, but they are their shooting stars. At times she will observe the problems of our world as the myriad of complexities and dynamics that they are, but doesn’t feel the need to reduce them to a palatable or easily digestible phraseology. When she does so she can be stunningly poetic. In arguably the best line of the album, she closes IOU by shrinking a complex narrative into an ambitious expression, “old world underground, I never knew you/ but I’ve seen your face everywhere there was a farm, before we tore the small town down”. She evolves completely beyond the pernicious systems that previously receive most of her attention in Love Is A Place, gently offering “Where are you from, love is a place”. It’s in moments like these that Haines stealthily intimates that she is a far better writer than she is letting on. The mixture of fairly pedestrian and pedantic wordplay with these intersectional rhetorical threads make for an impressively robust arc to the whole album.
Instrumentally, Old World Underground conveys a similar attribute of subdued melodic sensibilities. Which is not to imply that the album is not often blistering and intense, but that it’s most dazzling intuitions are deployed sparingly. As if adhering a little too literally to the their name, there is a didactic and binary structure to many of their arrangements, some if it reduced to a cubist and geometrical approach. The oscillations at the end of IOU sound less like a theramin being played than one being programmed. The crests and dips of the guitar, laundered and sanitized from the waning days of grunge, form the melodic hook of Combat Baby. Haines is on the nose and then some in Succexy, singing “passive attraction, programmed reaction”, while the guitars and overall beat wander into predictable territory. The garage band platitudes and aphorisms, claiming how real they are at the end of The List only weaken an already unnecessary subplot in the album.
However, Metric at other times pull off fairly standard instrumental or melodic manoeuvres with convincing aplomb or charisma, speaking to the vitality of the group’s internal chemistry. The pressuring whispers turning into sarcastic grandiosity in Wet Blanket as the stripped down guitars run up against uneasy and portentous synth swirls is explicit and smartly conceived. On A Slow Night, with its decidedly too cool for school static infused guitar strut is slowly but surely supplanted by even nerdier keyboard dials. The gratuitous circling of forlorn piano in IOU conveys a group trying to break free of the institutional rigidity of pop music. The List revels at its onset with agitated synth warbles that ooze intrigue. In Dead Disco the secondary rhythm guitar threads the needle between peppy and derisive admirably. They may not be the newest tricks, but Metric ably applies their own idiosyncrasies to them.
Courtesy of Alysse Gafkjen
More refreshingly is that in establishing much of the album’s charm, Metric obviates the need for hooks and instead opts for burgeoning melodic ideas that they carry across the finish line despite their intrinsic awkwardness. The clunky alt balladry that slickly slides into an alluring and surreal lullaby in IOU is like listening to a heretical, if seductive, incantation. The wispy coos that plummet into a gulch of dredging guitars in Wet Blanket is startling and stimulating. Haines’ whiplash inducing dips and peaks in her vocal thralls for The List is exhilarating. Beyond that they also just have a couple of genuinely killer hooks. The slipstream sleekness of IOU once it gets going or the redolent crescendo of Hustle Rose comes to mind. Dead Disco brings these talents to their apotheosis with Haines’ desperate lyrical rant during the coda as the rapid clip and xylophone like synth coalesces into a tense and furious doom scroll. There are even sparks of true asymmetrical creativity, like in the hypnotic cadence of the first half of Hustle Rose that segues into a simmering pop sleeper agent. Elsewhere the tangled innuendo of wordplay in certain parts of Succexy hit the mark. The surprisingly emotive arrangements of Calculation Theme give the track a slightly alien, but no less beautiful, incandescent glow. As Dead Disco barrels towards it’s conclusion it morphs into moribund gothic intonations, but rather than wallowing in them in a tired funeral sense, they escalate into unexpectedly frantic and epileptic outbursts. In an album of patchwork ideas that are at times randomly stitched together it’s interesting in that you can spot the clichés and strokes of genius alike. It’s the later that comes out on top.
Haines doesn’t really have the vocal chops to prove truly evocative or formidable (she doesn’t sound great in Combat Baby) but she finds inventive and engaging work arounds to these deficiencies at key points in the album. The low-key bellowing “Remodel!” in Dead Disco, elongating the word for as long as she can get away with is riveting. The clapping howls behind the chorus of the same song also snap you into attention. The ephemeral haze that lifts her voice beyond its corporal bounds in IOU as she transitions into an imaginative tirade against colonial delusions of grandeur is terrific. Her craven and hollowing out of her soul as she mocks bad faith arguments in Succexy is convincingly melodramatic. While it’s not her best offering, the pleading, “don’t go quietly”, in Combat Baby is a line that’s striking in its disarming sincerity. Haines purposely contorts her vocals into awkward positions, seemingly just for fun in Wet Blanket, as if to provide some bizarre substance to such a superficial topic. She manages to reinforce her invectives with armoured certitude in how she yells during the chorus of The List. Haines is at her most effective when she simply avoids singing however. Old World Underground reaches it’s emotional pinnacle when she stops treating it as an artistic endeavour or expression of id and simply sits down to communicate with you. “I wish we were lovers, but it’s for the best”, she calmly tells in Calculation Theme. “The sun becomes her, he agrees”, she speaks on Love Is A Place sounding at once at her most commanding and her most content.
Contentment is something that’s possible and achievable in Old World Underground. It’s an increasingly difficult mental or spiritual state to ascend to, and doing so in of itself can be an exhausting experience. Haines spends so much time excavating and ruminating on the nature of cynicism through duelling and binary definitions; one of sheer opportunism as weaponized by cultural and political elites, and another of being so perpetually wounded and hurt that you’re too damaged to care anymore. Haines shows how debilitating it can be to orbit around these definitions continuously, how it can leave you as nothing more than a scornful and ossified person. Therefore at key points Haines articulates, brilliantly, the utility and vitality of finding any reason to be content or at peace, even if that can only happen in quiet, insular contexts far removed from the arenas of public life in which we battle for hearts and minds across a vast swath of contests.
As a result, a great deal of emphasis is put on the quiet grandeur of Calculation Theme and Love Is A Place, the two tracks that articulate this thesis. In these songs she is reserved and cautious, barely ever communicating above a conversational impetus. When you put so much energy into righteous fury or proving how much nothing matters any more, there is so little left for anything else. Haines takes what little energy she does have left and makes it count in remarkable ways along these sequences. She is timid sure, but there is grace and fortitude in her processions. Relaying how exhausted and tired she is in Calculation Theme she effectively reflects that imbalance of passion and contentment that stalks the entire album. It’s an imbalance we all surrender to at one point or another. And yet the pure clarity of her observations “half the horizon is gone, skyline of numbers”, shows that beneath the corroded cynicism of the album there is a humble vibrancy, even if it only registers as twinkle. In Love Is A Place, as simple a song as there is in the collection, Haines is far removed from that hesitant throat clear at the beginning; it’s the smallest sounding song in the album but here she is at her most confident and resolute. It’s thematically fulfilling that this is where she is also at her happiest. Amidst a meek and blissful guitar line, finally Haines can offer not just a question, but also an answer. “What’s holding up her face? Nothing but blue skies, passage ways to windows that don’t close”. The subtle optimism in such an allusion is deeply profound, and more importantly feels wholly earned.
While it takes the whole album for Haines to get there, the seeds of her epiphany are wisely planted in the first track. To return to the paraphrased sequence in IOU revolving around the metaphor of shooting stars and falling bombs where she reveals, “but she doesn’t make wishes on them”, Haines further explains, “When she wishes she wishes for less things to wish for, more ways to work towards it”. Getting away from that ever consuming cynicism and the gravitational pull it has on our lives- all of this takes work, every day, all of the time. There is no quick or easy way out of the cultural black hole we have all spent a lifetime digging for ourselves. No wishes or fantasies. But if a child in a scorched and traumatized quadrant of the third world can eschew such fantasies in the service of actually working towards a better life, we have not just an opportunity but a moral obligation to do the same. That opportunity has always been there and always will be; the window that won’t close. If Haines is willing to admit just how long it took for her to find it, the least we can do is listen to her. Of course, the whole point of Old World Underground Where Are You Now is that there is still so much more to be done.
(ed note- the music videos are not great. The early 2000s were a strange a time. Try not to hold it against them)