{"id":149072,"date":"2012-06-28T14:52:06","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T14:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socancom100stg.wpenginepowered.com\/taking-the-reins\/"},"modified":"2012-06-28T14:52:06","modified_gmt":"2012-06-28T14:52:06","slug":"taking-the-reins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/taking-the-reins\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking The Reins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les traductions pour les articles avant l\u2019automne 2013 ne sont pas disponibles pour le moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Control.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a treasured commodity, the ability to call your own shots, and when you consider it in the context of a recording artist in the music business, as rare as liquid plutonium.<\/p>\n

But with its fifth album Synthetica, Toronto\u2019s Metric have achieved the unthinkable: Singer and synthesizer player Emily Haines and guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Shaw \u2013 the exclusive songwriters for the band \u2013 along with bass player Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key are now determining their own destinies and answering to no one. With the exception of Haines and Shaw\u2019s publishing deal with BMG-Chrysalis Music, Metric\u2019s business is insular, operating their own MMI label, building their own T.O.-based Giant Studio, forming their own management firm and reaching the world through label-licensed partnerships.<\/p>\n

Buoyed by the global success of 2009\u2019s Fantasies<\/em> \u2013 which sold nearly 500,000 copies, a million singles, earned the band two Juno Awards (for Group and Alternative Album of the Year in 2010), and helped secure their total independence \u2013Metric’s 12 year career has yielded them a confident maturity and empowerment that’s evident in the sound throughout Synthetica.<\/em>

: \u201cWe started getting into these really deep, heavily-distorted synth sounds that are really the sonic identity of the whole thing.\u201d \u2013 Jimmy Shaw<\/div>\n

The 11-song album boasts a synth-driven sonic canvas that includes such gems as the percolating \u201cArtificial Intelligence,\u201d the explosive \u201cYouth Without Youth,\u201d and even a boisterous duet between Haines and Lou Reed in \u201cThe Wanderlust.\u201d It also signals a new creative dawn for the foursome, one that’s free of external pressure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole process felt more natural \u2013 more like us than ever before,\u201d says Shaw on the line from New York. \u201cAt the end of the day, when you listen to it, it sounds the most like us. It\u2019s just us having the time and space to explore everything we really always wanted the band to be. It\u2019s everything we\u2019ve tried to do all coming together in one sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

The changing circumstance surrounding Metric\u2019s business also energized the band, creating some new precedents in shaping the album.\u00a0For example, Metric began working on Synthetica<\/em> in 2010 within 24 hours of concluding the Fantasies<\/em> tour in Miami.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were literally in the studio the next day,\u201d confirms Shaw, who also produces Metric (Synthetica<\/em> was co-produced by Eight And A Half\u2019s Liam O\u2019 Neil). \u201cWe finished the tour in Miami and we just wanted to keep rolling. We were feeling really good at the end of that run, and we were feeling inspired, so we just took that energy and ran with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emily Haines, who writes the lyrics, also behaved against type.
\n\u201cI normally don\u2019t write on the road,\u201d admits Haines, in a separate interview, also from New York. \u201cThis time, I had a lot of fragments \u2013 not songs, but very clear lyrical passages. Sort of a vision of the kinds of songs I wanted to write.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the process for me was actually gathering from various corners of various devices and scraps of paper, and kind of consolidating all those ideas into one massive book, which I then brought into the studio.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

For the sonic template, Shaw went on a vintage synthesizer-buying spree \u2013 ARPs, Moogs, Rolands \u2013 forming a compartment in Giant Studio that he calls \u201csynth world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe studio is in a building right behind my house, and in order to get to my car, I have to walk through it,\u201d he explains. \u201cEvery time I left the house, I would walk through, hit \u2018record,\u2019 walk over to the synth, play something for 10 minutes, and then leave. That\u2019s where a lot of the writing came from, for me.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight away, those little seeds had an energy to them that we just tried to keep throughout the making of the record. Then we started getting into these really deep, heavily-distorted synth sounds,\u201d that are, like in the beginning of \u201cArtificial Nocturne\u201d and \u201cDreams So Real,\u201d \u201creally the sonic identity of the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaw says the creative process between him and Haines works different ways.
\n\u201cUsually it\u2019s a musical idea that I\u2019ll present to her,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ll write a whole song \u2013 an \u2018A\u2019 section and a \u2018B\u2019 section \u2013 with bunch of instruments and drums and a beat. I\u2019ll send it to her, and usually she\u2019ll throw it into GarageBand and start singing over top of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen we get together and form it into a completed song. The other process is that she\u2019ll come in with a completed song and I\u2019ll start to \u2018Metricize\u2019 it: Speeding it up by 20 bpm [beats per minute], and then suggest things like moving a section over there\u2026Why don\u2019t we say that line three times in the chorus\u2026 Or instead of doing that, chop it all up.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Haines, her album priority became lyrical clarity, and Shaw feels she\u2019s achieved a breakthrough on Synthetica.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEmily has a way of lyrically tricking, and I\u2019ve tried for years to get her instead to tell me how she feels,\u00a0\u00bb he says. \u00ab\u00a0We\u2019re finally at the point where she\u2019s doing that more than we ever have in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Synthetica, Metric become masters of their own domain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-non-categorise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}