Knives Don’t Have Your Back…

If you like the band Metric (of which she is the lead singer) or Haines’ work for the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene (notably vocals on ‘Ballad For a Seventeen-year-old Girl’) I can’t, in all honesty, say whether or not you are going to like this album at all!

The nearest this album gets, musically, to anything on Metric’s Old World Underground, Where Are You Now is probably The Lottery. It reminds me ever so slightly of Calculation Theme but even that connection seems tenuous.

On this album Emily plays piano and sings – that is basically the deal here. There are also other musicians involved of course, drawn from the firmament of Canadian talent that currently seems almost unstoppable, but this is a very personal recording and it is hard to reconcile this album with her Metric persona. Released by Last Gang Records, it is presented in a quite splendid digipack including full lyrics. My current favourite tracks are 'Crowd Surf Off A Cliff', 'The Lottery', and 'Reading In Bed' but that could well change with repeated listening.

It is difficult still to see how this album fits in, until you delve in to the background of both band and artist, when some of it really starts to make sense - particularly if you can find a copy of her 1996 release "Cut In Half And Also Double".