As an American, I often find it difficult to talk about popular music, especially when I mention how good Canadian music is. The reply is usually, “Canada? Really?”

Yes, Canada. Really. k-os, Tegan and Sara, The New Pornographers, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, The Hidden Cameras, The Dears, Constantines, The Weakerthans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Stars, Death from Above 1979, Feist, Peaches, Duchess Says, We Are Wolves, Wolf Parade, The Stills, Final Fantasy, The Unicorns, Royal City, Cuff the Duke, Black Mountain, The Luyas, Wax Mannequin, Chad VanGaalen, The Meligrove Band, Jim Guthrie, Veda Hille, Tokyo Police Club, Islands, Frog Eyes and Sunset Rubdown, to be more precise. If you didn’t know, Sum 41 is Canadian as well, if you’re into them.

For those of you more receptive to analogies, let me put it this way:
British music : 1960s :: Canadian Music : 2000s

The independent music scene in Canada is probably the most urgent and vibrant in the world right now. Something’s happening up in the Great White North, and it’s probably not because of the frozen snowscapes and poutine. Many of these bands owe their start to FACTOR, the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records. If anyone is hesitant about subsidizing the arts, this is your counterexample.

Fantasies is about 85% rocking out, and it's an amazing sound.

My favorite album of 2008 was Land of Talk‘s tragic rocker Some are Lakes, but it faced a lot of stiff competition. 2009 is going to be a lonely year, because Metric’s Fantasies came out in April and nothing’s going to dethrone it. And I’m perfectly all right with that.

Metric is a New Wave-inflected indie rock band whose poetic, fragmentary lyrics often comment on coming-of-age, troubled personalities, and the problems of consumerism. (And if anyone points out the hypocrisy of then having your music used in a Polaroid commercial with the lyrics edited to be more family-friendly, I will cut you.) They also veer wildly from mellow synthesized melancholy to rocking out as hard as possible. Fantasies is about 85% rocking out, and it’s an amazing sound.

It’s been more than three years since Metric has put out an album; in the downtime front-woman Emily Haines embarked on a solo project in collaboration with the Soft Skeleton, releasing the elegiac piano-driven Knives Don’t Have Your Back and What is Free to a Good Home? Meanwhile bassist Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key put out their own album, the blisteringly punk Best Friends in Love under the name Bang Lime. But finally the band’s back together again, and all the better for it.

Though Fantasies is a mere ten tracks like its two predecessors, it never leaves you feeling short-changed after the long wait. The most intriguing aspect of the new album is how unified it sounds. Previously, there would be strange disjuncts on a single album, such as the minimalist “Calculation Theme” co-existing with the apocalyptic dance beat of “Dead Disco.”

On Fantasies, each track is heading in the same direction, supporting each other and feeling like part of a greater whole—not a concept album, but each song feeling like it’s in conversation with the others. This makes for fewer outliers, and nay-sayers might claim that every song sounds too similar. But Metric’s been improving their game all these years, and their amalgam of dance-pop and indie rock is surprisingly nuanced.

The trio of tracks that follow the anthemic opener “Help I’m Alive” are exploratory and run the gamut, with “Sick Muse” showcasing the guitar-heavy sound of modern Metric, while “Twilight Galaxy” recalls the synthpoppish aesthetic that the band has drifted away from but cherishes like a memento.

On the flipside, “Collect Call” is the most romantic Metric’s been since Old World Underground‘s “Love is a Place,” telling us “Wishing you could keep me closer / I’m a lazy dancer / when you move I move with you.” And “Front Row” is a wily beast; on an initial listen it doesn’t really sound like anything. But it’s been ringing in my head and I can’t stop thinking about Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner when I hear that track. (If you want to send me hate mail after that comparison, my e-mail’s up top. Also scroll to the bottom for a pleasant surprise!)

If I had to list a negative for any part of this album, it’s that Metric-as-a-social-critic feels like an increasingly untenable niche, especially with the direction that that band’s sound is taking. Not that Emily Haines can’t write critique; her bizarro lounge-singer spoken word tale about Vegas in Grow Up and Blow Away‘s “Rock Me Now” mysteriously worked. And “Our hell is a good life” from her solo album is a pithy line that lesser writers would kill to have penned.

But “Gold Guns Girls” is too on the nose to be effective, a resuscitation of the robotic repetition of “Buy this car to drive to work / Drive to work to pay for this car” from Live It Out‘s “Handshakes.” Like that track, “Gold Guns Girls” seems like it would be killer performed live, modulated through Haines’s stage presence; but in the studio, “All the gold and the guns in the world / could it get you off?” comes off as unconvincing; the track’s saved mainly through Jimmy Shaw’s driving guitar and the relentless pace. The problem is that you can’t dance to satire; although if anyone could prove me wrong, it’d be Metric. But not this time around.

But if a single track could sum up this album, it’s the epic centerpiece “Gimme Sympathy,” titled after two Stones tracks and name-checking George Harrison. It’s four minutes of pure sonic perfection, the inspired marriage of synth, guitar, bass, and drums. This track defines Metric’s sound and its lyrics encapsulates the band’s entire theme—its entire oeuvre.

Haines asks us: “We’re so close to something better left unknown / I can feel it in my bones / Gimme sympathy / After all this is gone / Who would you rather be / The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? / Oh seriously / You’re gonna make mistakes, you’re young / Come on baby play me something / Like “Here Comes the Sun.”

I am sure some reviewer out there will miss the point entirely and take the opportunity to level charges of hubris against this band. So I’m going to head them off at the pass and say the following without a hint of hyperbole:

Metric is the most talented quartet of musicians since John, Paul, George and Ringo.