With a production of six albums in 24 years, Feist is one of those artists who like to take their time. Result: the Canadian singer-songwriter never stops exploring, and each time manages to renew herself without distorting herself. This is still the case with Multitudeswhich comes six years after his previous album Pleasureand twelve years after she won the Polaris Prize for Metals.
It’s been a long time since Leslie Feist moved away from the charming indie-pop that propelled her among the most popular artists of the 2000s. Multitudes is probably both his most bare and most experimental album, with his quasi-folk songs that leave plenty of room for guitar-vocal interpretations, his sometimes dissonant coatings and a panoply of strange sounds that dress it all up.
This may surprise you at first listen. The first piece, In Lightning, sets the table without compromise. But if we let ourselves be guided by the purity of this recognizable voice, and take the time to enter into his poetry which speaks of the passage of time and the state of the world, plugged into nature and the amount of contradictory emotions that inhabit each person – Feist once again proves here that she is exceptional songwriter –, Multitudes is an enveloping and stimulating album, deep and moving.
Between heartfelt cries well sent from Borrow Disorder and the immense sweetness of Love Who We Are Meant Topassing through the incandescence of Of Womankindthe airy lightness of The Red Wing and the brilliance of Hiding Out in the Openthere is as much beauty and sensitivity as there is intelligence and subtlety in this new album by Feist, which here seems to be at the top of its game.
At a time when AI seems able to create its share of prefabricated songs, Feist is in any case proving that its uniqueness, this mixture of inspiration, talent, reflection and human emotion connected directly to the heart, cannot be reproduced by a machine anytime soon.
Song
Multitudes
Feist
Universal