METRIC
Fantasies
(Metric Music)
Rating: 
Metric is the brainy outcast of Toronto’s messy, incestuous indie scene. The band, fronted by the frosty Emily Haines, traffics in angular, political postpop—songs that demand debate even as they push you onto the dance floor. Fantasies, their fourth album, is easily their best, rich with hooks and suffused with the “radical compassion” Haines sings about on the throbbing “Front Row.” Opener “Help, I’m Alive” is a gorgeous meditation on the terrors of everyday life, while the ecstatic “Sick Muse” and the slinky “Gimme Sympathy” seek happiness in life’s simpler pleasures: love and the Rolling Stones, respectively.
