Metz

Toronto power trio METZ play like one brutally heavy instrument with three heads, slashing heavy-gauge strings, bending guitar and bass necks in weird unison, along with what is probably the loudest drumming you’ve ever heard. 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. They play the instruments, the amps, and the room.

The three men of METZ — 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. Or on the plane, as the case may be for their maiden voyage to New Zealand. Over the last three-and-a-half years, METZhave slayed in basements, skate shops, clubs, and festivals around the world, 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, they successfully documented the unrelenting live force of the band, and managed to add some new and staggering sonic textures to the recording. Waves of organic feedback and fuzzed-out drones build the classic 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—and they do it collectively. With their debut album, released last year on Sub Pop via Inertia, METZ articulated with deafening clarity, that a new power trio is just what the world of good music needs. It’s a hell of an experience, listening to this band; stand back, and watch jaws drop within the first four measures of their set. This is post-hardcore sludge-punk, distilled into pure, but artfully rendered chaos by one of the most brutalising bands in the world today.

“The technology to crank your guitar up to huge, ear-busting levels can be purchased over the counter, but bands that can pull off volume while inducing claustrophobia are something special. Metz are such a band. The Toronto-based trio’s Sub Pop debut is pure pummel and ugliness in the best sense. The drums thunder away like they’re being bludgeoned at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The bass and guitar pound minimalist patterns through a curtain of fuzz and grit. The songs sound live– not in the sense that they were recorded as-performed, but in the way that represents what loud bands actually sound like when they turn up at a grimy club with cement walls. High frequencies bounce through the stereo field. The vocals seem feedback-baked and half-strangled. There are moments when Metz betray a minor debt to grunge, but most of the time, they’re out on their own bizzaro wavelength, singing about rats, mental instability, or whatever else conjures up appropriate levels of anxiety” – PITCHFORK Top 50 Albums of 2012.