In Music: Feist's 'The Reminder'
Plus: Arctic Monkeys and Low.
By Erica Gorochow, Alexander M. Belenky, and Graham Webster
Monday April 30, 2007
Feist
The Reminder
May 1, 2007
Arts & Crafts / Polydor
If becoming a pop star was anything like the normal employment process, Leslie Feist’s CV would rise to the top of any pile. Her highlighted bullet points include band experience with Broken Social Scene, former roommate status with Peaches, fluency in French and English, and the ability to jump around gracefully in sparkly blue spandex (see the new “1,2,3,4” music video). Of course, that’s not to mention some friends in very high places.
But just because you look good on paper doesn’t mean you’ll become employee of the month. Completely unaware of her credentials, I first heard Feist through the two-bit speakers of a 1990 VW Golf weaving its way down the Czech Republic hillside. We played my friend’s new copy of Let it Die on repeat all the way home from Berlin to Prague, where I was studying abroad. The songs became cemented in my head as I fell in and out of sleep against the seatbelt. Sly but honest and refreshing, it provided the ideal soundtrack.
Let it Die is certainly not perfect, but charming and sophisticated in a strangely unpresumptuous way. Feist’s voice was and still is her most outstanding feature: sometimes demure, not particularly agile, but utterly charming. Her melodies and lyrics are marked by the way she captures sublimity through imperfection. The same winning trait shines through on her third proper album, The Reminder.
The first single, “My Moon My Man,” is one of the album’s more upbeat, rolling offerings. The piano pounds while Feist’s voice and lyrics swirl. A twangy guitar bridges everything together until the track can’t resist bursting into dissonant pop. Despite her coy begging (“take it slow/ take it easy on me”), Feist sings with an underlying confidence that makes giving in to rest of the album easy. Curiously, at the end, we hear a clopping at the door and birds chirping—birds that Feist reportedly struggled to record naturally outside of her studio in a house outside of Paris. Appropriately the sounds are used to transition into the next song, “The Park.” Here the album takes a dip into its heavy side: slower, simpler, and heartbreaking, this is more familiar Feist territory. But the following track, “The Water,” becomes the emotional focal point and, alongside “Intuition,” is one of the album’s gems. Minimal but decidedly polished, the nature-themed lyrics and melody of “The Water” exemplify Feist’s talent for wrapping the complex in the simple. The weighted-down, tragic tone meshes well with the gentle relief of a trumpet’s sparse riff. This all produces something refreshingly naïve—not stupid, or even innocent—adding an extra edge of stillness.
Unfortunately, the next song—a Nina Simone cover-remix titled “See Lion Woman”—is one of the album’s bigger disappointments. Collapsing instead of building, the track puts a splinter in “The Reminder.” Although Feist spun around in wonderful ways the six covers that comprised half of Let It Die, she fails to make “See Lion Woman” her own or worthy of the already often-sampled original. The track comes off as an unfit crutch to an album by in large composed of original material.
But that is not to say that Feist didn’t have a little help from some seriously talented friends during the creative process: Jamie Lidell, Mocky, Renaud LeTang and former collaborator Gonzales were all invited to produce The Reminder. Lidell’s decisive soul-piano style make “There’s a Limit to Your Love” another top track. Ron Sexsmith and Feist’s brainchild, “Brandy Alexander,” is catchy, informal, and begs a sing-along. Eirik Glambek Bøe of the Kings of Convenience even adds backup vocals to the album’s concluding declaration, “How My Heart Behaves.”
Even among all the star-studded help, Feist shines brightest. The Reminder confirms that Feist is worthy of comparison not only to today’s most talented neo-folk singers but also the movement’s best songwriters. This release has the confidence and overall strength that was at times lacking in Let it Die. Now if only I could find some rolling Czech landscape to make the listening experience complete.
—Erica Gorochow, Northwestern University
Erica Gorochow, who graduated from Northwestern University in 2006, lives in Cologne, Germany, where it’s not so unrealistic to head for the Czech hillside.
Arctic Monkeys
Favourite Worst Nightmare
April 24, 2007
Domino
If you’re a young band, how do you follow up your record-setting first album, which holds to the mark for the fastest-selling debut in U.K. chart history? Do the same thing again, of course. Overall, Favourite Worst Nightmare, the new album from British rockers Arctic Monkeys, resembles a slicker, beefed-up version of its 2006 predecessor, Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, as if the band used the mold of its first hits to craft an entire album. The ska riffs on Whatever’s less memorable cuts have largely been jettisoned for a more consistent dance-funk groove (a likely result of recording with British producer and DJ James Ford), with the addition this time of some reverb-drenched, Dick Dale-style surf guitar to round out the avalanches of distortion. Like a rollercoaster, Nightmare provides a rush with every song—even if it is the same every time.
Where the album falters is in the songwriting. Whatever was memorable for its witty play-by-play narration of youthful high jinks—nights out drinking, dancing, and flirting that could lead to a fight or jail as easily as romance. But it seems the tornado of stardom that lifted 21-year-old frontman Alex Turner out of Sheffield’s working-class reality has stripped him of interesting material; all that’s left are clichés. Tracks like “Brianstorm,” “This House is a Circus,” and “If You Were There, Beware” depict groupies, fake friends, and relentless gossip columnists who leave Turner predictably jaded.
—Alexander M. Belenky
Low
Drums and Guns
March 20, 2007
SubPop
If Alvin and the Chipmunks were a regular band sped up, Low has historically been a not so regular band at half speed. Ever since their 1994 debut, I Could Live in Hope, the ethereal sounds that set the dark, emotional mood for much of their music has been almost exclusively analog—guitars, pianos, drums, and vibrato-less vocals. With Drums and Guns, Low has once and for all defied the critical consensus that branded the band as slowcore. Don’t get me wrong: This is no dance album. But from track two, electronic sounds, sixteenth notes, and a new kind of momentum appear. By track six, “Always Fade,” the hybridization of Low’s old style and their new feel is complete, with a dizzying but driving beat that recalls Radiohead and Björk.
In addition to slowcore, critics have slapped Low with the “sadcore” label—a sort of darker and more sinister version of “emo.” But interpreting Low as a “sad” band ignores the persistence and defiance of the trio’s vocals and their lyrics. A far cry from the deeply-troubled pessimism of Elliott Smith, Low’s harmonies, the long vocal sustain, and the righteous force of lead singer Alan Sparhawk seem to cry out, like 60‘s activists, “We Shall Overcome.” That’s the essential force of Drums and Guns, an album that begins with a dark assessment of war and captures the feelings that many of us have today: anger at a disastrous war, brooding questions about how to stop it, and an underlying hope that somehow, someday, humanity will find its way.
—Graham Webster
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Comments
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hi
— taha - Feb 6, 10:16 PM - #how r u? can we reconize?
Feist is a good singer and songwriter, but I’ve never been a fan of her arrangements. I find I like her much better remixed.
— Lori - Aug 31, 04:39 PM - #