Metric: Synthetica

By Alif Omar Mahfix • 16 Jul 2012 in Review

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ASYMMETRICAL
Synthetica isn’t quite a balanced album. While the good outweighs the bad, the former makes the latter especially frustrating considering how much better they are capable of being. Take their collaboration Lou Reed, ‘The Wanderlust’, which is a near perfect pop chiaroscuro of saccharine (vocalist Emily) and bitterness (Lou), and then take ‘Breathing Underwater’, a painfully generic pop rock track.

Yet this barely matters when ballad ‘Clone’ or ‘The Void’ exemplify the album’s title, the real versus the artificial, in its synthetic riffs and cold tones vis-à-vis Emily’s emotionally vulnerable vocals. Synthetica isn’t the best they can do, but it is Metric’s best album thus far.

LISTEN TO: ‘The Wanderlust’, ‘Clone’, ‘The Void’
IF YOU LIKE THIS YOU’LL DIG: Emily Haines & the Soft Skeletons, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
RATING: 3