Feist: Multitudes album review — songs of strangeness and ecstasy

The extremes of Leslie Feist’s career lie between her teenage years playing in a hardcore punk band in Calgary, yelling so loudly that she damaged her vocal cords, and the use of her song “1234” in an iPod advert in 2007, which turned the now delicately voiced Canadian into a mainstream indie star. Her new album Multitudes touches on both poles. There are moments of folky alt-rock of a kind destined for coffee shop playlists, but also a persistent streak of disruption and unpredictability.

At a surface level, not much happens in the songs. In “The Redwing”, the singer-songwriter sees a bird in the garden of her California home. “I Took All My Rings Off” revolves around the twin acts of her taking her rings off and then putting them on again. The lack of narrative incident is all the more striking as Multitudes is Feist’s first album in six years, during which time she has become a mother and lost her father, the abstract painter Harold Feist. But at another level, the songs are rich in content.

Elemental imagery turns up repeatedly in the lyrics: lightning, flowers, trees, lots of birds. The outlook is expansive and symbolic. “I Took All My Rings Off” transforms its simple scenario into an ecstatic reverie about nature and the cosmos. It opens with a simple acoustic thrum, but takes a more complex turn with changes in direction and texture. A discordant electronic melody starts up towards the end amid ecstatic chanting and hypnotic rhythms. What began straightforwardly a few minutes earlier becomes a quite different, stranger and more rewarding affair.

Feist’s usual singing style is a sweet quavery murmur, the definition of tastefully restrained emotion. But imaginative vocal production creates the sense of overlapping Feists murmuring or trilling melodiously in our ears, an intriguing blend of intimacy and embellishment. She dares to essay some throwback punk-rock shouting in “Borrow Trouble”, which starts as a ho-hum indie-rock anthem before being knocked off course by the abrasive squeal of a wayward sax solo. The album closes with Feist crooning the word “begin”, keeping us on our toes until the last.

★★★★☆

‘Multitudes’ is released on Fiction Records