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Let’s Hear It For The Noise Metz may be noise rock’s flavor of the week, but expand your palate to these four bands: Greys, Coliseum, KEN Mode and Cold Fur 12
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It happens all the time. It happens within
every genre and subgenre of music imaginable, and it’s never going to stop until humanity is a distant memory, remembered only as entries in encyclopedia apps on the iPhone 584 available to our mutated cockroach successors. From Bach to Bieber, from Nirvana to Elvis, from Skrillex to Arcade Fire, there’s always one band/artist that—for reasons explicable and inexplicable and beyond the trite “they’re awesome, dude”—seems to garner the lion’s share of attention, while others languish in relative obscurity. The indie community has its handlebar moustaches and retro-granny panties all twisted over Toronto-based noise-rock trio Metz. Take two steps, and you’ll probably trip over fawning press and someone sporting its merch. Now, as we all know—but sometimes forget—music is a subjective beast. Everyone’s opinion about the quality of any band is their opinion about the quality of any band. What you, I or the fencepost thinks about Metz doesn’t speak to the actual value and quality of its music. Indeed, its self-titled debut is raging, interesting, toe-tapping and
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enjoyable, but so many eggs are being placed in one particular basket that the forest is being forgotten for the trees, so to speak. So, in order to give you a broader picture (and to knock a few features and reviews off Señor Miller and Bonazelli’s to-do list), we’re going to commandeer the spotlight and not only shine some wattage on a few other bands from the same side of the musical tracks, but also offer some insight about the phenomenon of en masse focus on one band above similarly deserving others. Not that you need to be told, but noise rock didn’t start the day Metz was released. Touch And Go, Amphetamine Reptile, Dischord, the Jesus Lizard, Drive Like Jehu, Slint, Steve Albini: These are names you’ve stumbled across, and are—and forever will be—the starting point for any band of this ilk. This is confirmed when MAGNET contacts Greys’ Shehzaad Jiwani, Coliseum’s Ryan Patterson and KEN Mode’s Jesse Matthewson (all three of whom are their band’s guitarist/vocalists), as well as Cold Fur drummer Dave Leto. That these individuals have had their musical paths clear-cut by the usual suspects is no surprise, but what