Send "Feist " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The headline of one of the best Hollywood gossip stories you're likely to encounter this year reads, "Shia LeBeouf and Michael Bay Got in a Really Big Fight Over Feist." To prepare for an emotional scene in Transformers 3, LeBeouf plugged his iPad into a pair of on-set speakers and was vibing to The Reminder ballad "Brandy Alexander" when Bay abruptly shut the song off. Things got heated, "spit [was] flying," and Bay stormed off set. Whatever this incident tells us about Michael Bay (like maybe he's just really impassioned in his opinion that Let It Die was a better record), it tells us even more about where we're currently at, culturally speaking, with Feist. Even among Hollywood titans, she's divisive. She has probably, over the past couple of years, helped an infinite number of jocks and action stars get in touch with their latent emotions ("It's a little feminine," LeBeouf told the Los Angeles Times of "Brandy Alexander", "but it touches me"). But most importantly, the low croon of her honeyed, creaky-door voice has become pop culture shorthand for "the diametrical opposite of what robots blowing shit up sounds like."And yet, her third album, Metals, is full of dynamic outbursts. There's the chorus of austere, male shouts that punctuates "A Commotion", the towering, climactic swell of strings in "Anti-Pioneer", and plenty more folk-pop numbers that begin small but explode suddenly into stomping, hollering, densely peopled jamborees. Building on some ideas she first explored in The Reminder's lively take on the folk traditional "Sealion", Metals is a record animated with, as she put it, "the movement of a lot of humans." Though her least immediate album-- it lacks The Reminder's pop showstoppers or the charm of Let It Die's restless genre-hopping-- Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself....full text |
| Prettymuchamazing |
| The 200th episode of Later…with Jools Holland was, to put it lightly, a seminal moment in music history. Of course Thom Yorke was there gyrating his sinewy body in spasmodic fits unseen since the second coming. Chan Marshall was surging every watt of Cat Power out of her hip heartbroken frame. But the chanteuse that really got people movin, even Mary J herself was bumpin to it, was Leslie Feist’s “Sealion”. Sure she played the what must have been the painfully ubiquitous “1234” (which was actually written by Sally Seltmann) and “I Feel it All” (in the vein of The Inbetweeners), but the sheer earth-quaking might captured in her voice alone was enough to make me forget all about commoditized coffee shop crooning. It’s been almost five years since her bellwether The Reminder, during which our Canadian sprite in question starred in Kevin Drew’s The Water as the silently emotive Mother character and also taught kids how to count to four on Sesame Street (I thought that was Count’s job?) among numerous other endeavors. For an 18-month period she never even touched her guitar. It simply sulked in the corner of her room because “I didn’t think I had anything to offer it”. But after dusting off her musical cobwebs on this her fourth album, it’s quite clear that she’s exorcised all the encroaching fame demons, casting them asunder with a hammer and a whisper....full text |
| Guardian |
| Among the ranks of platinum-selling singer-songwriters whose music ends up wafting around commercial breaks and dinner parties alike, Leslie Feist cuts a unique figure. Her music has been used to flog everything from Silentnight mattresses to iPods, but her background is on rock's artier fringes, where the ad men and compilers of Acoustic Chill Vol 2 rarely tread. On YouTube you can find Feist tapdancing in a fluorescent outfit in the company of longterm collaborator Chilly Gonzales; baptising crotch-fixated rapper Peaches in a Los Angeles swimming pool; licking Peaches's bicycle in another clip; and starring alongside Cillian Murphy in a 16-minute arthouse film called The Water – light on dialogue, heavy on meaningful facial expressions, approvingly described by one reviewer as "excruciatingly slow" and directed by Kevin Drew, her sometime partner in sprawling Toronto art-rock collective Broken Social Scene. Buy it from Buy the CD Feist Metals Polydor 2011 Tell us what you think: Rate and review this album You could probably tell as much from the way Feist presented herself: her videos have been big on dance routines and low on please-take-me-seriously-for-I-have-listened-to-Joni-Mitchell earnestness. Indeed, you could probably tell as much from her music, which, while never going to cause your guests to choke on their hot chocolate fondants, is far more intriguing and diverse than any of her peers: her last album, The Reminder, skipped from country rock to jazz to garage rock so subtly you barely noticed how scattered it was. But an arty background and vast commercial success often make for uncomfortable bedfellows. Having publicly rued her decision to license her songs to adverts and play the big arenas, Feist recorded Metals after an 18-month lay-off during which she claims to have forgotten how to play her old songs. Recorded with her regular team of Gonzales and Somalian-Canadian producer/songwriter Mocky, it certainly sounds like a record made while cut off from the rest of the world. There's always been something ramshackle about her approach, but Metals strips away all of its predecessors' gloss. There are scratchy guitar figures and rhythms based around clapping hands and stomping feet, the latter ranging in style from jolly communal campfire event to theme tune from Mastermind. Meanwhile, the arrangements are many things – the brass that suddenly rises out of the gloom of Undiscovered First is stirring; the sawing, cyclical strings that underpin A Commotion are intense; the flute that flutters around Bittersweet Melodies is whimsical – but the one thing they never are is sumptuous. The tunes on Metals are too attractive to make the album a straightforward up-yours-to-the-dinner-party-hosts gesture; if you're trying to divest yourself of a mainstream audience, you would be advised not to write something as undeniable and charming as The Circle Married the Line – although a big obvious hit like 1,2,3,4 is conspicuous by its absence. The lead single, How Come You Never Go There?, is a beautiful song with the kind of understated vocal that has led critics to wax purple in the past, but it's also in a weird time signature: it lurches, rather than flows....full text |
Feist lyrics Music videoclips
|
| |||||||||||||
