I've always liked the Emily Haines and Metric stuff that I've heard before, but with Fantasies, Metric's latest, they really, really hit it. To me, it sounds like a buzzing, super-charged amalgam of say Lush (circa Split and Lovelife), post-Execution of All Things (ie, poptastic) Rilo Kiley, Garbage, the Killers and Pretty Girls Make Graves and Sleater-Kinney (particularly the more mellow end of the last two's palettes); it's not stretching too much to say that those are a few of my favourite things, and it's not stretching at all to say that Fantasies is totally excellent.
New wave, power-pop, bubblegum (and sometimes slightly harder-edged) punk, modern rock and glossy stadium-pop all feed into the mix, and the result is a record made up of 10 magnificently listenable songs, all immediately catchy and all also more inventive and layered than is at first apparent. Picking favourites is difficult - I like the most direct tilts at anthem glory like "Help, I'm Alive" and "Sick Muse", but the angular pop directionality of cuts like "Gold Gun Girls" also appeals, as does the archetypal penultimate track slow-burn of "Blindness"; and then there's the golden-edged, Stones and Beatles-referencing "Gimme Sympathy" (featuring some particularly Rilo Kiley-esque moves including a rather Jenny Lewis-styled vocal from Haines, who in fact proves herself a much more versatile singer throughout than I'd previously given her credit for), which was the song that prompted me to seek out the album after I heard it on the radio one morning. Also noteworthy is "Satellite Mind", which reminds me of the minor classic "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" - which makes sense given that Haines was, of course, the vocalist on that particular BSS track.
So it's pretty much perfect feel-good summer-time music for the Belle & Sebastian crowd - although to say that is almost certainly to generalise too far from my own experience. But either way, this is a fantastic album.
