Old World Underground Where Are You Now?

Limited vinyl LP pressing of this classic 2003 release by the Canadian band. Their debut album, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? launched Metric's career and helped to usher in a wave (or New Wave) of Canadian indie bands such as Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire. They have since gone on to sell over a million singles and 500,000 albums worldwide. Finally available on vinyl, the album sounds as urgent and timeless today as it did in 2003 and like all of Metric's music to date, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? isn't so much a summation of influences as experiences. The old world underground they so romanticize; they're not sure if it ever truly existed. They say there's no time like the present; what they really mean is there's no such thing as the present. Five seconds into the future will be five seconds in the past once you finish reading this sentence. Translated into rock 'n' roll, terms, it means you're either ahead of your time or past your prime. And we're cool with that. We like categories and demographics and timelines because they allow us not to think; everything can be explained with the check of a box or a dot on a graph. But Metric don't let you off that easy. Their measures are decidedly cubist: eternal, multilayered portraits of instantaneous moments, the luminous blur of street life rendered as a freeze-tableaux, daily rituals portrayed in a fantastical light. This is music born out of sly, considered observation instead of gratuitous introspection - which makes it refreshingly anomalous in an era when so much popular music fudges the line between self-absorption and self-parody.