Metric, Fantasies

Metric's fourth album takes them further into a world of synthesized drones and echoing drums, a futuristic landscape where desire gleams from every surface, omnipresent but unquenchable. The songs hurtle forward so fast they threaten to catch fire, with only Emily Haines's voice to cool them down.

The songs on Fantasies are founded on an irresistible pattern of tension and release, riffs that wind tighter with every repetition until they burst into widescreen. "Can you hear my heart beating like a hammer?" Haines sings on the opening track, "Help I'm Alive," as clanking loops and Joules Scott Key's drums build and swell behind her, until James Shaw wipes the slate clean with a blast of knife-edge guitar.

Paradoxically, Fantasies is both Metric's most controlled album and its most passionate. The rocker's lament of Old World Underground…'s "Dead Disco" has evolved into the plaintive mission statement of "Collect Call": "If somebody's got soul, you've got to make them move." Songs like "Gimme Sympathy" and "Satellite Mind" twitch like rats with batteries wired to their spinal chords, a sensation likely to grip the unwary listener as well.

The album peaks with "Gold Guns Girls," a sleek, seamless contraption whose parts overlap with breathtaking precision, each one layered on top of the next until the emotional kick is almost too much to bear. But really, every song is a keeper, part of a near-flawless whole that only improves with repeated spins.