Norman Wong
Joules Scott-Key, Josh Winstead, Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw (from left).
Jimmy Shaw didn’t necessarily expect to sound like a music historian at this point in his illustrious musical career, but given the massive industry and technological shifts the Metric guitarist/co-founder and his bandmates have witnessed over the last two decades, well, here he is, on the cusp of launching a 24-city tour (including the Orpheum on Feb. 13) for Pagans in Vegas, Metric’s sixth full-length release, and waxing a tad WTF.
“When I started thinking I was going to make music back in the ’90s, the landscape was get a record deal, get an advance, become a huge artist,” he says. “There weren’t bands who did their own thing.”
Metric, of course, was one of the bands that helped send that apple cart skyward in 2007, breaking through the major-label logjam to form its own label and release two albums in the course of two years — Grow Up and Blow Away and the lauded Fantasies — that put the band’s synth-fueled sound and lead singer Emily Haines’ sultry vocals squarely in the vanguard of a massive indie-rock explosion. (Not to mention securing their eternal place in the Canadian Hall of Fame.) Seven years removed from Fantasies, things look a little, well, different. And eerily similar, too.
“In the last five years, everything’s taken a sharp turn back to the late ’90s,” Shaw says. “We thought the Internet was going to democratize music, but tech bought music like a side salad at a buffet lunch. We’re all just fodder for tech now.”
That cynical perspective’s part of the vibe that fuels Pagans in Vegas, an album that finds Metric embracing their synth-based roots like a well-worn plushy pillow, both because they wanted to and because they can. Shaw insists that Pagans, an album that emphasizes analog-programming elements and modular synthesizers, has no specific unifying theme, but you don’t have to look too far to see a few connecting threads.
“Guilt, she is the governess that guides me back to greed,” Haines purrs on “The Governess,” the latest single from the album, encompassing a sentiment that couldn’t fit more tidily into that me-decade zeitgeist if it tried. That “I want it all” chorus on the emotionally ironic “The Shade” fits in pretty well, too. They’re the sort of sentiments the band’s bedrock influences — think Depeche Mode, the Cars, the Cure — would have endorsed.
“It’s all going to shit, but you’re going to Vegas instead,” says Shaw of the album’s vibe. “The ship’s going down. You can jump in and try to swim, or you can just fuckin’ party down until the last second. It’s Vegas — everyone knows it’s wrong, but people still go there.”
Shaw laughs when it’s pointed out that the ’80s-inspired sound Metric helped resurrect in the mid-2000s, alongside fellow Canadian acts like Stars and Arcade Fire, is front and center in the pop-culture landscape yet again.
“I distinctly remember a music industry exec telling me once, ‘If you do your own thing, it’ll be trendy at least twice,’” he says. “We’ve always done the synth thing. We accentuated the hell out of it on Pagans. What resonates with you is what you end up doing.”
That said, Shaw and Haines, who write all of the band’s material, were keen to avoid getting caught in their own infinite analog loop.
“We were fighting against our own past,” he says. “We were fighting against making Fantasies again.”
Madison is the second stop on the band’s tour, and Shaw’s eager to showcase a more polished vibe than he felt the band achieved when it co-headlined the Smoke + Mirrors tour with Imagine Dragons last summer.
“That tour threw us on a schedule that wasn’t ours,” he says. “The truth is, we’re really only good when we’re guiding our own ship.”