The six years since the release of Leslie Feist’s last album, Pleasure, have been momentous ones for the Canadian singer-songwriter. She has relocated to Los Angeles, adopted a daughter and lost her father. Death, birth and persistence inform her moving, raw and occasionally unpredictable sixth record, Multitudes.
Over the past three decades, Feist has established herself in indie music as one of her generation’s most distinctive voices. Since the release of her solo debut in 1999, she has produced Grammy-nominated and Juno-winning records that oscillate between intimacy and experimentation. At the height of her popularity – with the 2007 song 1234, which soundtracked an iPod commercial, or 2004’s Mushaboom – she harnessed pop-focused hooks and acoustic warmth, clothing layered compositions with a catchy simplicity. But her back catalogue is full of unusual sonic details too: 2011’s Metals is punctuated by dynamic bursts of stamping, shouting and scratching guitars, while Pleasure (2017) saw her stretching out into five-minute tracks that unfurl into swaggering riffs.
Read the review in the Observer.
[This piece was published on 15/04/23]