TORONTO — It’s on me, but I still think of Metric as a slept-on political band that only my DC friends like, the Canadian cultural fluke that’s oddly able to capture the 2004-vintage Bush-era zeigeist better than most American rock groups. It turns out that in Toronto they play the equivalent of the Hammerstein Ballroom and meatheads on the free shuttle bus back to Union Station drunkenly chant the chorus to "Dead Disco."

Metric have never been an uplifting band. "Poster Of A Girl" documents compulsive, soul-killing sex, for instance. Their new material might be exceptionally bleak. The first song they played last night at the Sound Factory, a massive club on the pier off of Lake Ontario — Toronto was the worst vacation choice possible — was either about cocaine addiction or significantly influenced by it, and borrowed heavily from "Love" by Smashing Pumpkins. Metric’s new record, allegedly out sometime next year, is called Help I’m Alive, if that’s any indication of the band’s emotional state, and the tone is appropriately topical. "Gold Guns Girls" appears to tie the global economic meltdown to Metric’s other favorite subjects, meaningless sex and meaningless war. Emily introduced it as a song about "the end of excess." Its coda chants "More." Musically the new material is about as far from Live It Out as Rocket To Russia is from The Ramones. Is it ever brave not to progress?

Two interesting facts about seeing shows in Canada. They solve the all-ages problem by cordoning off areas in the club as designated drinking zones. As a result I saw much of the show on closed-circuit video projection. And it is apparently socially acceptable to wear Metric and Tokyo Police Club t-shirts to shows that Metric and Tokyo Police Club play. It’s the subtle differences that make Canda feel so disconcertingly off-brand, the Go-Bot to America’s Transformer.