There was a time, in recent history, when you needed to have at least twelve members to even be considered a band in Canada. You'd go to a show and you might be the only person in the room who wasn't playing an instrument. Hard times. Thankfully, there are always a few naturally resourceful people who refuse to be intimidated or excluded from making their own wild racket in public. Alex Edkins, Hayden Menzies and Chris Slorach have been around long enough to know that if you can't fit it in the van, it's not worth bringing. METZ play like a brutally heavy, three-headed instrument, slashing strings, bending instruments and pounding drums in weird unison. It's a return to everything that's good about loud, ecstatic live music; a frantic nod to Nation of Ulysses, Shellac, The Pixies, The Jesus Lizard, and Public Image Ltd. at their most vicious, while still carving out some heavy new business.
Over the last three-and-a-half years, METZ have slayed in basements, skate shops, clubs, and festivals, sharing stages with Mission of Burma, Death from Above 1979, Archers of Loaf, Mudhoney, Oneida, Constantines, and NoMeansNo. It's a formidable task to try and capture such a powerful live band on record. Luckily, Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck) and Alexandre Bonenfant were more than up for it. Isolating the band in an old barn for a week with a portable recording rig, Walsh and Bonenfant documented the unrelenting live force of the band while adding new and staggering sonic textures. Waves of feedback and fuzzed-out drones build the tension that eventually drops into each track's relentless, dissonant pulse. And somehow, the raddest thing about it all is the songwriting. It's not just riffs. It's something that some heavy bands don't get, but METZ do really well. With this, their debut album, METZ articulate with deafening clarity what we've all known for some time: The world of good music needs a new power trio, and this is it.
