Feist

Before the break-out success of Let It Die (2004), Feist recorded a handful of songs known as the red demos. The hit song "Mushaboom" was one of these tracks, and to those only familiar with the polished single, the original might sound unrecognizable. Gone is the lilting jauntiness that sent the tune sailing along into accessibility; instead it's raw, melancholy, and bluesy—a lament for un-found adulthood in league with early-era Cat Power or a more tender hybrid of Karen Dalton and Billie Holiday.

On The Reminder, Feist resurrects the red demos' prickly beauty, without sacrificing the slow-burning pop fabulousness of her previous record. This time, however, soulfulness outweighs sleekness, as on "So Sorry," a stripped-down acoustic guitar track that puts her cracked jewel of a voice front and center for a contemplative apologia. With its buzzes and chirps, "The Park" sounds as if it could have been recorded there—but judiciously placed orchestral flourishes add an unexpected layer of sophistication and richness. Meanwhile, bouncier tracks like the sunnier-side-of-heartbreak "1 2 3 4"—a crowd-pleasing combination of banjo, bluesy piano, hand claps, and horns—betray the irrepressible joy that lies just beneath the surface of these songs' perfectly pitched wistfulness.

Oddly, it's "The Water," a track reinvented from that original red demo set, that feels like album's centerpiece: the rippling percussion, softly plucked bass, and keys conjure up a hushed reverence for the natural ebbs and flows of life—a theme that persists throughout as Feist touches on the power of nature, the inevitability of change, and the need to find safe harbors. Feeling like a return to a never-before-glimpsed form, The Reminder solidifies Feist as a rare and classic talent.

- Jocelyn K. Glei
05.04.07

When Leslie Feist released her breakthrough Let It Die, almost instantly she became an indie icon. Her pretty, sometimes melancholic love songs, her clear, campfire voice, her vaguely jazz- and disco-influenced arrangements (highlighted no better than with her cover of the Bee Gees' "Inside and Out"), and her association with darlings Broken Social Scene wooed critics and music fans alike. Her follow-up, The Reminder, will serve as proof that Feist's success was no fluke, as the album contains more of the same sweet, introspective lyrics and chords that float around love and longing (or lack thereof) like cottonwood seeds in late spring. Because that's what The Reminder, like Let It Die, is really: warm, lazy music made for those summer afternoons that creep into evening before you realize it. Feist's voice is as cleanly emotive as ever as she sings lines like "There's a limit to your love/Like a waterfall in slow motion" (from "The Limit to Your Love"), "Piecemeal can break your home in half/A love is not complete with only heat" (from "Intuition"), or "Put your weight against the door/Kick drum on the basement floor" (from the upbeat "I Feel It All"), confident but with a weakness, a fragility in it that comes out during the most sentimental lines. But this can also be a drawback. The singer can, at times, border on a kind of sappiness that seems better suited to Top 40 Matrix-produced pop songs than hipster-blog accolades. "We don't need to fight and cry/We, we could hold each other tight tonight," she breathes in the otherwise lovely "So Sorry," whose puerile rhymes are fortunately held up by the track's breezy sophistication. The same cannot be said however for "Brandy Alexander," which is too syrupy for its own sake (much like the drink on which it is based), with its repeated phrase "He's my Brandy Alexander" (juxtaposed with "I'm his Brandy Alexander") and "Goes down easy," as Motown-esque harmonies jump in to emphasize that last word. Why Feist, who shows her lyrical skills in tracks like "The Water," "My Moon My Man," and her reinterpretation of Nina Simone's "See-Line Woman" (incorrectly identified as "Sea Lion Woman"), "Sealion," believes it necessary to include such saccharine lines is a bit confusing, and hints at the suspicion that while undoubtedly she seems to have enjoyed very much making The Reminder, she also wasn't really challenging herself with it. She follows the same path she took with Let It Die -- which, being as strong as it was, is certainly not the worst decision she could've made -- and does it well, which means that the album does end up a consistently good listen. But it also means that it's not much of a departure from what she's shown before. Who knows, Feist may be able to go on charming us by doing the same thing for eternity, but there may also come a point when we want something more, and it's still unclear if she'll be able to deliver that. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide