You can’t always judge music by what it sounds like. Well, you could, and then you would probably say that Metric is a great pop band, but you would only be half right. While their 2003 release, Old World Underground, Where are you Now?, is catchy like flypaper, it sticks long enough for you to figure out what synth-playing singer Emily Haines is actually saying about pop-culture. The four-piece of no fixed address have been lazily labeled pop by many a music writer for singles like “Combat Baby”, in which Haines sings about “caffeine-free faux-punk fatigue,” over punked-up guitar riffs provided by James Shaw. And unlike any good pop band, they formed themselves. In 1998 two Canadian kids—Haines and Shaw—formed Metric in a Brooklyn loft. Since then drummer Joules Scott-Key and his Texas schoolmate Josh Winstead, who happens to play a mean bass guitar, have completed the band.
Besides, they are definitely living more like rock stars than pop artists. In fact, these interviews with Shaw and Haines are conducted during a hectic sound check, after a day of cancelled credit cards, crashed rental cars and food-poisoned caterers, before the band is to play a sold-out show at Vancouver’s legendary Commodore Ballroom. All the while, Shaw is nursing a “seriously, really intensely gnarly hangover,” which he acquired while watching his friends in The Dears play the previous night. So while simply dubbing Metric as pop music may be slightly misguided, it is not totally unjust, as Shaw has always understood why they used it: “I’ve always thought that I have a really solid pop sensibility. Things have to make sense in my ear, in a certain way that is very poppy. We can try and subvert it with different tone, or productions sounds or whatever, but the fact is a lot of the time my ear is just drawn to the really blatant pop changes and hooks.”
Haines has her own opinions. “I think it’s just sonically, and the album definitely came out in the height of garage rock cool, which we were aware of. And figured that since we are a real band it would be a bad idea to just suddenly change our sound and try to sound like a garage rock band like a lot of people did,” says Haines of her suspicions of the pop quagmire. “Our choices musically, the changes and the choices of sound, and I suppose my voice to some extent are kind of pop.” Haines sings sweetly and softly, but carries a big scream as was made apparent on stage that night. “As soon as it’s a girl it’s lighter. Maybe, but I like to think of it as pop isn’t a dirty word... The Kinks and the Zombies—and Bowie—both wrote real, incredible pop songs. Not super dark, and grungy and mid-tempo. Pop’s okay.”
Haines embraces the pop label, but Shaw still has his reservations. “I don’t like it when people use the word, because it has the connotations to a bunch of really crappy music, but 
the word itself is not a dirty word to me.” So when describing Metric to your friends and co-workers, when they ask you what that song you won’t stop singing is, remember this: It is acceptable to use the word “pop,” so long as it’s not the last word.
Metric writes songs that are raw and hookier than a meat factory and take an almost punk rock, DIY approach to creating and releasing what Shaw says is “not immediately understandable music. It’s not like it’s going to get sent to the radio and it gets huge over night. You have to be patient with it.” So after their lawyer Chris Taylor shopped the band to hundreds of labels, and a deal with the ironically-named Restless records—who sat on Metric’s original debut album Grow Up and Blow Away—fell through, Taylor and the band took matters into their own hands. “Basically, [Taylor] just came to us one time and said ‘I’m just going to start this label because we can’t find the right home for you guys,’” says Shaw. “So we just made it ourselves.” With that, Last Gang Records was formed. Another thing that Shaw has made for himself is a studio in his basement, where he is producing the band’s new music. Since then, Last Gang has signed Torontonian boogey-men from the basement Death From Above 1979, and independent-legends from Montreal, Tricky Woo. Last Gang is building its ranks and gaining in strength and turf, with Metric’s next album to be released all over the globe.
Pop stars making their own music. This doesn’t seem right, but there is a well-written rhyme to this backwards reasoning. Shaw explains: “I always figured that unless you’ve sold 50,000-100,000 records there is no point in even entertaining the idea of being on a major label because you’ll just get crushed. Look at what’s happening to Fiona Apple right now,” he says. Apple, whose label Sony sees as some sort of anti-pop superstar, is apparently too anti and not commercial enough to take sales away from Avril Lavinge or Ashley Simpson. “She’s sold millions of records and her company doesn’t like her record so they’re not going to release it. I just don’t ever want to be in that position. I’ll forgo the opportunity to make millions so I am never in that position.”
Another description of Metric that seems to fall flat is the title of New Age. True, they 
have a new, original sound, but the album is overtly heavy with a longing for something lost in the past. Throughout Old World Underground, Where Are You Now, Haines evokes images of small towns and farmhouses. “It’s a feeling I had, and seems like my friends do too, that things seem to be moving too fast. In my lifetime, literally, in the town where I grew up, it was. In “IOU,” that lyric, across the street from me, looking out the window, it was an old farmhouse. And in my lifetime it became paved over for a 24-hour Tim Horton’s and a gas station. So, it’s in some way’s literal, but figuratively it’s longing for a simpler time.”
While Metric may stand alone musically, they are not by themselves in the feelings their music reflects. And while everyone but Scott-Key had the decency to dress up real nice-like for the show—Winstead and Shaw in black jackets and white ties and Haines in a chic mini-dress—the show was far too loud and sweaty to be compared to any pop-concert conducted in the last decade. During “Wet Blanket”, Haines looks out over the packed Commodore with bouncing fans taking full advantage of the horse-hair floor and cracks a satisfied smile during the refrain. She is clearly not “wrong to want more than a folk song.”
