Although Metronomy’s elliptical, insidious, multi-coloured and richly textured art-pop sounds nothing like Cologne’s legendary purveyors of prog-disco, Can offer some clues to the lineage Metronomy belong to. Add early Brian Eno, Sparks, Devo, Talking Heads, Soft Cell, and then scratch your head for more recent examples of abstract music, full of experiment and risk and individuality, that somehow resolves itself into pop that makes you sing at the top of your lungs, dance like no-one’s watching, and feel like a big kid, and you realise that you can’t think of any because Metronomy are, in the current pop milieu, an utterly unique proposition.
Their new album ‘Nights Out’, released at long last this September is a second album that feels like a debut. Its the first Metronomy album to be vocal-led, with self-effacing founder member Joseph Mount stepping up and grabbing the mic for most of the tracks; and, crucially, the first to introduce Metronomy as a three-piece band, rather than a pseudonym for Joe‘s solo work. Although he has worked with Gabriel Stebbing (bass, keyboards) and Oscar Cash (sax, keyboards) since their Devon childhoods, it’s the success of the trio’s live shows that has led to the realisation that the three schoolfriends are a bonafide group.
‘Nights Out’ is a timely, thrilling, pop album born out of ten years of a boy from Devon playing around, mixing it up, taking his time, getting it right, and pleasing himself. ‘I'm happy to have finished it, I'm happy that it's not worse than the first album...I mean that in a very positive way. I can't imagine how upsetting it would be to have finished it and ended up thinking “not as good as the first one†But it's hard to be really objective as it's still so fresh. I might give it a few months and then decide how good it is. Right now I'm in my new studio making lots of disco music, cleansing my palate.’
Joseph’s restless taste buds might be already nibbling at the next palate-cleansing project (he’s remixed, produced or collaborated with everyone from Gorillaz to Klaxons, Kate Nash, Roots Manuva and KD Lang, and counts them all amongst his fans), but ‘Nights Out’ is where Metronomy are right now. In it they’ve fashioned a future electro-pop classic – a wholly original mashup of electronic, falsetto-laden brilliance, and a thoroughly modern, freakishly danceable record to be listened to from start to finish. Consider the bar indefinitely re-raised.