METZ
Up on Gravity Hill
SUB POP
If you’re living in Queens, you’ve probably grown tired of hearing baseball fans chanting the local team’s fight song, even if the new season is already a month old. But take a nine-hour drive heading northwest, and such ballyhoo takes on a different meaning entirely. Shout “Meet the METZ!” to the rocker types (you know who they are—or who you are) wandering the streets of Toronto, the band’s home base, and they’re apt to reply with a devil-horn salute, a Ric Flair-style “Woo!,” or a wordless nod of acknowledgement—as if to say, “Yeah, we get it, they’re our city’s best noise-rock band.” Of course, there’s always the fourth reaction that exclamation might elicit: a blank stare by those who’ve seen the band perform too many times, sans earplugs. Talk about landing on deaf ears.
Indeed, since forming in the late 2000s in Ottawa, the three ragamuffins-cum-punk-technicians have mastered the art of the audio onslaught. (Side note: Why does it seem like the loudest and fiercest noise-rock bands tend to be trios instead of quartets? Do bands of the triptych persuasion worry that adding a fourth wheel would threaten blowing out stacks at every show?) Just in time for the start of the 2024 baseball season, METZ have stepped up to the plate with their fifth record, Up on Gravity Hill. Produced by the band themselves, the trio has ensured that their newest recording documents, as closely as a recording can, the experience of witnessing the relentlessly in-your-face noise-punk group in concert.
Unlike the start of a METZ gig, Up on Gravity Hill opens with a soft tease—a not-so-subtle reminder that the band knows how to have a seriously fun time without falling prey to seriousness. "No Reservation / Love Comes Crashing”—the second-longest METZ composition ever, by my count—finds frontman Alex Edkins conservatively using his distortion pedal and singing along to hooky riffs. But while a band like Cloud Nothings thrives in that niche, METZ clearly aren’t content living there; they deftly escape through a smokescreen of angular guitars and melodies that range from ear-sweetening (“Glass Eye”) to atonal (“Entwined”), furthering the mystery that is the band METZ.
“I give you everything I have,” Edkins croons at one point amid Hayden Menzies’ crashing, cymbal-centric percussion work and Chris Slorach’s firm anchoring on bass. Edkins’ straight-from-the-heart sentiment couldn’t be more truthful: On Side A, METZ lean into the adept songcraft that made each of their first four records a critic’s pick. After getting their chops loose, the band embarks upon a journey during which their tinnitus-plagued listeners witness METZ’s experimentalism, principally executed with white noise, on Side B.
The album crescendos with “Never Still Again,” the penultimate track and a song that would make the splintered factions of Sonic Youth smile. Finally, as if answering prayers while also slipping out one more trick from up their collective sleeve, METZ lower the lights and gently land with a slower-paced finale featuring a perfectly casted vocalist in Black Mountain’s Amber Webber, along for the delirious ride. Give ’em a yell, give ’em a hand, and let ’em know you're rootin’ in the stands!
