Feature interview: Metric; New Black tonight…

Category: Blog — @ 12:22 pm October 19, 2005

This week’s feature interview with Metric just went online (read it here). I didn’t get a lot of space, but I didn’t need much, either. Metric guitarist/songwriter Jimmy Shaw mostly talked about the process of recording the band’s new CD, Live It Out, and how much he hated going to Julliard. Since Julliard appeared so prominently on the band’s one-sheet, I figured he’d be tired of talking about. “Actually, no one’s asked me about Julliard before,” he said, then went on to rail against the institution. Guess that whole dancing-in-the-streets-of-New York thing you see in Fame is bogus, or Shaw just never took part. He also talked about his apprehension to finish the CD, second-guessing the quality of the tracking and underscoring the need for an outside voice to give the project perspective — in this case, mixing engineer John O’Mahony, who would stop Shaw from rerecording or throwing out tracks destined for the eraser head. “Someone’s got to kick you out of the studio or you’ll twiddle to oblivion,” Shaw said. “Someone was interviewing Miles (Davis) when he was painting in his back yard. They asked him to define jazz, and he put one last stroke on the canvas and said ‘That’s it, now it’s done.’ The whole point is to call it finished. You could go on forever, there’s no such thing as perfection. I got too close to the recording. ‘Poster of a Girl’ (off the new album) happened as it is right now on tape. I had it in my head that we had to go back and fix the arrangements. The first time John heard it, he said, ‘It’s finished. Give me the hard drive.'”

I didn’t go to United States Electronica last night because I plan on going to New Black tonight at O’Leaver’s with Ris Paul Ric, the new project from Christopher Richards of Q And Not U. New Black has been compared to Le Tigre, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Lost Sounds, Death From Above 1979, Sonic Youth, X-Ray Spex, ESG, Suicide, X, and Siouxsie And The Banshees. Yikes. 9:30 p.m., $5.

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