Metric is pure style. Looks, mood, content and experience, it’s about a haunting lyric that resonates or an impossibly catchy hook. The Toronto band’s impeccable retro glam is largely due to the ultra-hip, sixties Factory image of frontwoman Emily Haines, whose solo work and collaborations with Broken Social Scene have sometimes eclipsed the Metric project. Yet Metric is in many ways better known and more beloved, and for those who’ve caught on it’s like a best kept secret. Metric’s first album, Grow Up and Blow Away, was a sleeper hit (originally recorded in 1999, Grow Up and Blow Away has previously been sold only at Metric shows) and, like the best sleepers, its re-release this year is like a brand new occasion. For audiences more familiar with the band’s commercial debut, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving) or the last release, 2005’s Live it Out (Last Gang), it’s easy to hear the evolution of Metric’s sound by listening to this earlier stuff. It’s much more reminiscent of Haines’ solo work (like 2006’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back), which showcases eclectic indie vocals and ambient sounds over the bumpin’ synth-rock Metric is best known for. With a previously unrealeased new Metric album supposedly in the works, Haines seems to be branching out in numerous directions, with a soulful style like Amy Winehouse, the poetic vein of Feist, the club-kid camp of Dee-Lite (with so much more talent) and a whole lot of Annie Lennox in the mix. (The Eurythmics are the band Metric is most often compared to). Innovative Toronto-based eight piece Crystal Castles is supporting Metric throughout this tour.

Technically, the UB Gender Institute’s annual Gender Week begins on Monday at 10am with a liberation bake-off in the lobby of the Student Union. But the keynote speaker, activist and writer Sarah Schulman, will read from her new novel, The Child, at Hallwalls the night before. The litany of Schulman’s activist affiliations reaches back to the late 1970s: member of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse; cofounder of the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival; member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power; cofounder of the Lesbian Avengers. As a journalist, playwright and novelist, she documented New York’s legendary downtown arts scene of the 1980s and 1990s; plot elements for Rent were stolen from her 1990 novel, People in Trouble. Schulman finished The Child in 1999 but could not find a publisher until this year. Why? Not because her writing isn’t good; no less a light than Kinky Friedman says that Schulman “writes with a stumbling grace, and she looks at the world from a fragile, refreshingly jaded angle.” Maybe it’s because, in a nation spinning downward (and to the right) into crass, bland commercialism, queer literature has a hard time finding a home. Which is why we need things like Gender Week. Schulman delivers her keynmote address on Monday at 4pm at 120 Clemens Hall. Visit genderbuffalo.org for a complete list of Gender Week events.

Being hailed as one of the most unique and inventive live acts around isn’t bad for a performer who began his career strumming a Cracker Jack box with a ruler taped to it—but that’s not all there is to be said about Andrew Bird. With his unique hybrid of Hungarian gypsy music, jazz and other musical influences, Bird has wowed audiences since beginning his career as the front man for Bowl of Fire 10 years ago. After releasing his 10th album, Armchair Apocrypha, earlier this year, Bird took his incredible blend of violin, guitar and glockenspiel on the road to present the songs to audiences in a way that is never a carbon copy of the tracks on his albums. In a live setting, Bird creates an orchestral sound by looping and weaving various tracks and combining them with an incredible ability to whistle. To see him create his music before an audience is a strange and intriguing sight, and the musical product is nothing short of arresting. The opportunity to see Bird performing in a live and intimate setting like the Church is a pleasure that no one, fans and curious listeners alike, should pass up. Montreal band Plants & Animals opens.

The good times are coming again, in the form of North Carolina trio Rick Miller, Dave Hartman and Mary Huff, collectively known as Southern Culture On The Skids (SCOTS). The band’s latest, Countrypolitan (Yep Rock), celebrates the salad days of Nashville in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when country music first started to go “pop.” Though SCOTS is certainly not the type to approve of the banal pop-country of today (this means you, Kenny Chesney), they do enjoy exploring the blurred lines of genre-mixing. Like the twang and synth refiguring of T.Rex’s glam-rock epic “Life’s A Gas,” or the faithful rendition of the trucker tale “Wolverton Mountain” or Huff’s beautiful belting away on Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love.” Recorded at Miller’s home base at Kudzu Ranch, Countrypolitan captures everything that’s great about SCOTS—or almost everything. As anyone who has seen the band live can attest, they remain the finest in concert experiences, a singing, dancing celebration of deliberately raucous white trash proportions. But consider y’allselves warned: Don’t be surprised if you get pelted with a breast or a drumstick during the set favorite “Eight Piece Box.” Consider it a sprinkling of a different sort of holy water, and that deep-fried poultry is really a baptism—a rebirth in a barroom church of country/rockabilly/trailer punk salvation. You will testify! Warm up duties comes from the queen city’s finest, honkiest-tonkiest ensemble, the Steam Donkeys.