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(Last Gang)

Ditching her soft skeleton for some tougher stuff and reuniting with her Metric band mates; Emily Haines lends those trademark wispy vocals to a series of enraptured reveries and fucked-up fantasies.

Their latest record sees the band straying from their punky roots to a much more current shoegazing-pop style. Far from a flavour of the month dabble however, Fantasies is a thoughtful exploration of the genre: Reverberating synths and crunchy guitar effects abound, playfully dominating Haines’ dreamy croons in -Sick Muse’ and blending seamlessly into them in the sultry -Satellite Mind’: Metric’s previous customs aren’t likely to be missed here but neither are they entirely unrepresented, especially in the ‘Poster Of A Girl’-esque -Twilight Galaxy’, toned carefully down and constructed to ‘Take you where you want, anywhere you want’.

Finding the balance between fantasy and reality appears to be the aim of the game here but it all falls effortlessly into place: Haines’ impassioned lyrics are consistently grounded by her band mate’s unembellished rock style. It’s this sensibility which that keeps songs like -Collect Call’ and -Gimme Sympathy’ on their feet while still giving them room to breathe – something which the ennui-inducing Emily Haines And The Soft Skeleton clearly lacked.

Praise for merely functioning as a band may seem undeserved but in this case, vocalist and band mates have brought together two wholly different approaches, combining the incompatible, mixing the immiscible and still creating roof-raisers -Help I’m Alive’ and -Stadium Love’. In this way, Metric have forged a ten track fantasy that is at once hard and soft, love and lust, dream and nightmare.

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