Album of the Year Nominee: "Fantasies" by Metric

Shortly after moving to California in the summer of 2007, I subscribed to the Today's Top Tune podcast at KCRW.com and was promptly served a warm helping from Metric's long-delayed release of "Grow Up and Blow Away," their inaugural studio album from 2001. Two and a half years later, I'll take that record over most others any any given day. If I was stranded on an island . . . you get the idea: it's stupid good.

I've never gotten around to picking up their eventual rookie effort, 2003's "Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?" or the subsequent "Live It Out," and the likelyhood of that happening any time soon just got diminished, as the Candadians this week put out "Fantasies," their new new record, and any time I had laying around for extraneous activities has been taken up with playing and replaying it, grinning like an idiot.

I don't do music reviews. I'm simply a man in search of a genre. And I'm pretty sure that if Metric were a genre, I would major in it. I'm only two listens in, but totally, hopelessly, deliriously hooked. Watch the video for the album's first single, "Give Me Sympathy," below. And ponder this:

"Who'd you rather be: The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?"