"We thought, 'Why don't we just ignore all the old preconceptions about putting out records and chart our own course?'" says Emily Haines of the Canadian band Metric, which performs tonight at Newark's Prudential Center.Don’t ask Emily Haines about “indie.”
“I don’t know what it means anymore,” says the Metric frontwoman. “I think it might be a font at this point. Which is fine, actually. Everything changes.”
Haines is still a young woman, but at 36 she’s old enough to remember what the much-abused word used to signify.
When the Toronto-raised singer-songwriter-keyboardist started her band in Brooklyn in the late ’90s, “indie” didn’t refer to a style of music. It was short for “independent.” An indie record didn’t conform to any particular style: It was an album that the musicians released themselves, without the assistance of a record company.
An album like Metric’s “Fantasies.”
“It’s something I’ll always be proud of: that we were able to reach the Billboard Top 20 (Rock Albums) without a label,” says Haines, who will take the stage with Metric tonight at the Prudential Center in Newark, opening for Muse. “I believe we’re the first band to do that.”
“Fantasies” is an unfettered expression of one band’s glorious neon-lit vision, but by no means is it a difficult indie-rock album. Equal parts classic rock and vintage new wave, the 2009 release is firmly grounded in pop tradition. Imagine catchy Blondie played by a band as accomplished as King Crimson or Pink Floyd, or the Soft Machine fronted by a singer as irreverent as Deborah Iyall of Romeo Void. The production is immediate, glittering, lapel-grabbing, but these melodies aren’t propped up by the band’s wattage.
Every song on “Fantasies” could be performed solo on piano or guitar. As if to prove the point, sometimes Metric does just that.
The album went platinum in Canada, and five songs from the 10-track set were spun off as singles. That’s not quite “Thriller,” but it does suggest that Metric has achieved a level of pop-culture saturation north of the border that eludes most acts, even those with major label support. In April, Haines and her bandmates — guitarist Jimmy Shaw, bassist Joules Scott-Key and drummer Josh Winstead — took home Juno awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys) for Alternative Album of the Year and Band of the Year.
“It’s hard for me to gauge our level of success,” says Haines. “Something in my brain makes me incapable of standing back and looking at it.”
While it’s plausible that Metric could have sold many more copies of “Fantasies” if it had been bankrolled by a big imprint, Haines has no regrets about the band’s choice to go it alone. After a long, uncomfortable look at the bottom line, she has come to the same conclusion that many of her peers are reaching.
“Once you really understand the math (of the record contract), you can’t do it,” says Haines. “They’re going to ask for rights over your next seven albums and take 50 percent of everything, at least, and for us, that was untenable.”
Metric has had a rocky history with labels. The releases of its first two sets were held up by record company dithering.
“We’ve had some label struggles, but we don’t have total horror stories. At least not compared to some of our friends’ bands. It was more a question of how we were going to self-actualize, instead of waiting around for somebody else to give us permission to be who we are. Besides that, changes in technology have hung a giant question mark over the entire industry. We thought, ‘Why don’t we just ignore all the old preconceptions about putting out records and chart our own course?’ ”
Good fortune has made Haines optimistic about the future of independent music, and Metric has taken advantage of social networking and digital distribution. The release of “Fantasies” wouldn’t have made the global impact that it did without these tools. The frontwoman is grateful; still, she has reservations about the purported techno-utopia we’re inhabiting. She has noticed that choice on the web seems to be evaporating — not because of censorship but because of conformity.
“Every time there’s a new technology introduced, there’s always an interesting period of chaos at first,” she says, “but after all the initial freedom, it reduces to something very different. Look at how we use the internet now. We’ve all got the same search engine, we’re all on Facebook. It’s the same pattern that you see all over in late capitalism: It starts to look so much like communism it’s hilarious.”
The daughter of jazz poet Paul Haines and a longtime correspondent with anti-establishment singer Robert Wyatt, the Metric frontwoman is outspoken about politics. Lyrics to Metric songs like “Succexy,” “Gold Guns Girls” and the Bobby Fuller Four-paraphrasing “Monster Hospital” (“I fought the war/And the war won”) use images of combat as metaphors for miscommunication and interpersonal deterioration.
Haines also has plenty to say about the dehumanizing effects of another battle: the one fought in the highly competitive contemporary pop scene. In “Front Row,” a fan at a concert spins out a fantasy about a misbehaving rocker; in “Stadium Love” (the nearest thing Metric has ever written to a genuine stadium-rock stomper), she imagines a Mad Max-style concert arena where “every living thing/Pushed into the ring” duels to the death to wild applause.
Even when the mood gets dark — as it often does — this album is a pleasure to hear. Haines delivers it all with wit, and a wink, and ambiguous references to popular idioms and rock history. On “Gimme Sympathy,” the most irresistible pop confection released in 2009, she asks: “Who would you rather be/The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” Haines might be implying that it’s better to burn out than to fade away. She might mean that she values longevity. She could be poking fun at the sort of glib classification tests that are popular on social-networking sites. Or all of the above, or none of it. She’s not saying.
“My brother has a vintage record store in Ontario. He knows all about songs, and he says that a song makes him think of a prism. For an idea to work it needs to be true in at least three ways.”
That’s not the only inspiration the songwriter takes from north of the border. Haines, who is also a member of the band Broken Social Scene, is proud of the stateside success of groups like Arcade Fire and the New Pornographers. The so-called Canadian Invasion of the ’00s crested just as her own band was picking up steam.
“I’m so happy that the perception of Canadian music has changed,” she says, “and I like to think we had something to do with that. When we started in New York, if you said you were Canadian, people would laugh in your face. I just went back to the old block we used to live on in Williamsburg, and there’s a new bar that serves nothing but Canadian beer. We’ve come far.”
Metric, opening for Muse
Where: The Prudential Center, 165 Mulberry St., Newark
When: Tonight at 7:30
How much: $42.50-$65; call (973) 757-6000 or visit prucenter.com.