By: Jon Behm
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Emily Haines of Metric - Photo by Jon Behm
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It all started innocently enough. As if the opener, Crystal Castles, are anyone’s idea of innocent. The intense duo of Alice and Ethan Fawn turned First Avenue’s stage into a mini-rave of two. Their video game-electronica is produced by putting an Atari sound chip into their keyboard, and lead singer Alice uses mic filters to distort her singing into the artificial sounding voice of a nightmare robot. At times, I felt a little like I had wondered into a Prodigy video. The strobes flashed at breakneck speed, a sinister, hooded Ethan hunched over his keyboard, while pasty white Alice thrashed around violently on the stage, at times crawling around the floor, leering at the audience like a ghoul. It was all a little frightening until I reminded myself that the group was Canadian, not vampires.
Some songs were a bit catchy, but most were fairly standard-issue electronica. How can you not love a group that has songs with names like “The Silent Voice of Insanity” though? Where they lost me was in Alice’s snotty Euro-thrash attitude. Wearing a permanent sneer, she closed her set by screaming to the audience “FUUUUUUCK YOUUUUU!” Um, fuck you too?
Metric was up next, the Canadian supergroup that have been on my radar since 2003’s release of Old World Underground. Did I say Metric? Perhaps I should have said “The Emily Haines Vagina Show,” as Haines wore nothing but a Jerry Garcia t-shirt and a pair of white tights, and her crotch was pretty much front page news throughout the entire set. Smiling sprightly, she danced, tickled the keyboards, and chided the audience for not “sweating enough.”
I think it was during the slow building “Empty,” when the young drunken girl (I have taken to calling her “Tipsy”) started careening into me. Rocking out with abandon she pointed repeatedly at Haines and shouted “YOOOUUUUU! YOOOOOOUUUU! We’ll get back to Tipsy later though.
Haines and her band sounded great. Metric’s new wave tinged pop was a real crowd pleaser, and they played to a packed house even though Canada’s indie-rock moment in the sun seems to have faded slightly this year.
In addition to older favorites like “Dead Disco,” Metric sweated through several songs off their newest album, “Grow up and Blow Away,” which was actually their first album, but was never released due to record company delays. It has garnered some good reviews and may be poised to leapfrog the success of Haines’ recent solo effort The Soft Skeleton. Metric’s glossy synth-pop is much more produced than Haines’ solo work, but the quality is no less.
It was right around “Rock Me Now,” when Tipsy began to be a major problem. No longer content to stumble and scream, she decided that she wanted to stand where I was standing and started pushing and kicking me to get me out of the way. Though I tried to reason with her, she was having none of it and continually clawed at me throughout most of the show, while I attempted to hold her off while trying to concentrate on the band.
Late in the set Haines and Co. treated us to the stellar “Combat Baby,” which apparently they have not played live in the U.S. this year until now. Prancing around the stage, Haines had a great time with it while guitarist James Shaw and bassist Josh Winstead jammed out. Right about that time, I had to deal with some combat of my own though, as Tipsy decided to haul off and punch me. She then made a short bull run at me, missed, and slammed into a wall of people. By the time Haines began singing the next song, I was already moving away to a safer area of the floor, as getting in a fight with a drunk girl is usually a situation where, really, nobody wins.
Shortly thereafter, Metric treated us to an unreleased song. Though I don’t know the title, the chorus line is “who would you rather be, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” It was catchy, and probably the first song I was able to listen to unscathed.
All in all it was a pretty exciting night. Punching and kicking aside, I really enjoyed Metric’s set, and may have even danced a bit had I not had a screeching harpy on my back. It’s a shame when fans at show attempt to ruin the experience for others (I’m talking to you girl-at-the-Fine-Line-who-always-screams-the-same-song-requests-over-and-over) but luckily a little good music can usually drown out even the most rabid fan, and I now know that it is possible to enjoy a show while simultaneously fighting for your life.
Location Info:
First Avenue
Artist Info: Crystal Castles, Metric
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