Rolling Stone (p.72) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Emily Haines delivers big refrains and spiky hooks, cooing about love on 'Sick Muse' and going dark on 'Help I'm Alive'..." Spin (p.80) - "Ever the empathizer, Haines calmly untangles her characters' despair, whether it's over the quietly pulsing 'Collect Call' or the driving electro rock of 'Satellite Mind.'" Entertainment Weekly (p.59) - "[Metric] amp up the melodies on their fourth album, tapping synthed-out industrial beats to vent their frustrations about the state of modern affairs." -- Grade: B+ Alternative Press (p.112) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "FANTASIES flows seamlessly from song to engaging song....It's a layering of everything Metric have created in the past with a sense of immediate passion." Billboard (p.37) - "[T]he Canadian quartet continues to polish its spacey, new wave-colored sound that's heavy with buzzing synths and echoed vocals." Q (Magazine) (p.127) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "It's an accomplished act of reconfiguration, brimful of potential singles, chiefly the tub-thumping 'Stadium Love' and 'Gimme Sympathy'..." Blender (Magazine) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[The album] adds brawn, finesse and grandeur to their new-wave drive and Morse-code guitar scrapes..." Pitchfork (Website) - "[T]here is a dreamy quality here that eschews the vague, easy rhymes and lyrical polemics of past Metric records in favor of romance and sex."

Rovi

Metric's third full-length album, Fantasies, is a glossy, slick, and so-clean-you-could-eat-off-it slice of modern rock that may scare off some of the band's early fans due to the unrepentant commercial nature of the album. Anyone who isn't repelled by the band's professionalism and ambition to sound perfect will find it to be quite enjoyable. You can't begrudge them taking a shot at the big time, especially when the result is as good as this. And it's not like they are doing anything radically different here; it just sounds freshly painted and shorn of any defects. In other words, it sounds just like an album by one of the bands that inspire them, finely tuned machines like the Cars, Garbage, Blondie, and Missing Persons. Or conversely, they sound sort of how you'd imagine the ideal Idol contestant's album would sound -- huge with an excess of glittering and hooks. Indeed, most of the songs on Fantasies wouldn't sound out of place on a Kelly Clarkson record; they are finely crafted, totally focused, and powerful pop songs that blend '80s new wave, '90s alt-rock, and timeless pop songcraft into compact pop nuggets. If "Sick Muse" were given a push on radio, it could easily be a big smash for the band. The hand-waving chorus, the pulverizing drumming, and the smooth-as-glass production are perfect for the airwaves. Quite a few others sound like they too should be blasting out of car radios on summer streets; the laser beam-tight "Gold Guns Girls," the shimmering "Front Row," and the propulsive "Gimme Sympathy" all fit this bill perfectly. The few ballads that dot the album like frozen teardrops betray none of the warm introspection that Emily Haines brought to her solo albums; her singer/songwriter demons sound like they've been exorcised once and for all here. Instead, they sound big enough to reach the back row of a stadium, as does the whole album. That Metric title a song "Stadium Love" gives you a clue to the ambition of the band. There's nothing small or careful about Fantasies -- it's a full-on bid for pop glory and it's a smashing success. ~ Tim Sendra

Rovi