Album Review: Metz – Atlas Vending


Atlas Vending




Metz have always been a bomb, but never one that went off.

The Canadian trio have spent more than a decade now exploring the post-hardcore landscape, their eponymous debut album reaching the public as far back as 2012, but vocalist Alex Edkins, bassist Chris Slorach and drummer Hayden Menzies have, as the press release for Atlas Vending acerbically notes, never allowed themselves to be, ‘Trapped within a format typically suspended in youth’.

Instead, Edkins is talking up their fourth album as their most creative, least definitive yet: ‘We’ve always been wary to not overthink or intellectualize the music we love but also not satisfied until we’ve accomplished something that pushes us forward’, he says, brandishing a record which gleefully swings from extreme to sublime and back again in a new/old Metz-like way.

Not that mellowing out is something you’d expect, and neither is that much on offer here. Opener Pulse crashes like a drunken man hitting a steel shutter door, a single, nagging guitar riff building up a wall of tension not quite ever released by the scathing breakdown it occasionally retreats to. As uncompromising re-introductions go, it’s a lurching, chaotically affirmative one.

There’s hardly respite either on Blind Youth Industrial Park, a bulwark against change if anyone was choosing to be critical of the more inclusive line the trio are theoretically attempting to walk. At its broadest dynamic though, this is still music with parallels in the sound of Ireland’s similarly uncompromising Girl Band, or even during the more ruminative Framed by The Comet’s Tail, American duo Japandroids.

When a shark’s fin of newness appears, it’s hard to chase down however unless concentration is applied: the 97 seconds of No Ceiling revels in its pristine, truncated structure, a love song of sorts; ‘I found a second act, I’ll hold it tight/Awoke a burning heart in me/Whoa, the dawn is/It’s in your eyes’, a brief episode that needs to spit out its message like a cork flying out of a shaken-awake bottle.

In former years, that sort of kinetic blast was what frequently sustained Metz, but the realisation that ultimately without finesse everything ends up with a shorter half-life has led them now to songs like Hail Taxi, a schizophrenic verse/chorus arrangement which under different ears might be something even close to the mainstream, depending just where you feel those particular cards might land.

Not being able to sustain is still a problem of course when noise compels, and Parasite ends up careering out of control like a broken truck crashing into wall after wall. But closer A Boat To Drown In, which muses on death as an alternative to a wrong life, is a startling full stop, its uncoiling outro locking with a thousand-yard stare for what feels like a brief eternity.



Atlas Vending may have surprised everybody, none more so then Metz themselves. Sometimes revolution just comes without the R.

7/10

Andy Peterson


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