Metric - Fantasies

Album-of-the-year you'll never hear.

Fantasies, the fourth album from Canadian quartet Metric, should by all rights be one of the biggest albums of 2009. It won’t, of course - the music industry doesn’t work that way. But any such heady combination of nailed on vocals, commercial hooks, lyrical populism and tightly-constructed songwriting deserves to produce the string of hits and subsequent ‘sound of the Summer’ feel that it surely would were it released by any more popularly recognisable act.

Right from the Garbage-esque opener ‘Help I’m Alive’, Fantasies grips you by the balls and refuses to let go until you’re singing, dancing and, hell, proselytizing until everyone around has either joined in, or wandered off to the Radio 1 playlist wondering what this music that the taste-setting bods refuse to give deserved exposure could possibly be. Indeed, were ‘Sick Muse’ to be given the radio play it undoubtedly deserves, there’d be a guaranteed top-10 single on the band’s CV. With singalong chorus, textbook indie guitars, and genuine girl power vocals, it’s a freakishly brilliant song.

The real genius of the album, though, comes in the awesome ‘Twilight Galaxy’. Built on Postal Service-esque lo-fi beats and shimmering synths, it’s here where the band sound most at ease. Balancing soothing loveliness with insane slow-burning catchiness, you’ve never wanted Emily Haines more.

The subsequent ‘Gold Guns Girls’ unfortunately, suffers in comparison, desperately trying - and someway failing - not to sound simply like a sped-up version of the previous track, pimped out with extra guitars. Typically, given the album’s commercial sensitivities, though, mark this song up as an offering by the staggeringly inferior Paramore, and the uninformed would lap it up. And it’s a pattern followed again, and again, throughout the album (except, perhaps, on the somewhat insipid 'Collect Call' - the token 'slow song', lacking the conviction to fully convince).

As with anything so pop-sounding, doubts persist over the album long-term appeal. But then, for a ‘sound of the Summer’ album, immediacy rules supreme over longevity. And with immediacy in spades, it’s time the mainstream woke up to the strengths of Canada’s best non-Crystal Castles export.

C.S.