Feist
Metals
(Polydor/Interscope/Universal/Arts & Crafts)
Leslie Feist’s fourth album doesn’t reveal itself casually. Likewise, the Canadian songstress doesn’t crack under the pressure of following up 2007’s breakthrough The Reminder: instead she sticks to her quiet, cosy strengths while stacking on instrumentation that can threaten to dampen her songs’ inherent campfire flicker. What ultimately pulls us in are the subtle conflicts: intimacy versus bombast, preciousness versus grit and arty chance-taking versus café-friendly nicety.
Keeping us at arm’s length early on are the obscured doom-and-gloom of relationship studies like ‘The Bad in Each Other’, ‘The Circle Married the Line’ and ‘Comfort Me’ (“When you comfort me / It doesn’t bring me comfort actually.”) Despite its teases of flightiness and the odd bluesy thrust, Feist’s voice often keeps to a smouldering drawl that doesn’t so much announce itself as float like a passing whisper. That makes certain standout moments stand out all the more: the repeated plea to “Bring ‘em all back to life” on ‘Graveyard’, the bumptious male harmonies befitting the title of ‘A Commotion’ and the assured ballad ‘Bittersweet Melodies’.
An unlikely gem is the album’s longest track: the beautifully sung ‘Anti-Pioneer’, another understated portrait of dissatisfaction. There are plenty of arrangement bells and whistles on Metals – from horns to harmonies to effects – and sometimes they crowd otherwise fragile pieces. But mostly they underscore the lack of easy answers in Feist’s songs, right down to the strings shiver of ‘Caught a Long Wind’ and the incidental jangles of percussion haunting ‘Get It Wrong, Get It Right’.
Nothing here is as instantly wowing as The Reminder’s ‘1234’ – the Sally Seltmann-penned single that soundtracked an Apple ad and introduced the world at large to an auxiliary member of Broken Social Scene – but these songs are more deeply grounded than that lullaby-ish crossover. Recording in California’s famously picturesque stretch Big Sur with a four-piece band, Feist came out with a superb collection that looks quietly inward rather than fidgeting over global success.
Doug Wallen