Feist - Pleasure
Drowned In Sound 80
It’s now completely clear that Leslie Feist has no intention on dining out on ‘1234’ for the rest of her career. If anything, she seems keen to put distance between herself and her breakout single. Letting a full four years pass before delivering a follow up, 2011’s Metals was an album of monochrome arrangements; shunning any reasonable chance of commercial success. It was also quite brilliant. And now after an even lengthier six year hiatus, Feist returns with a collection which marries the maturity of Metals with the fuller emotion of her earlier material.
The first thing you’ll notice about Pleasure is that it’s her most pared back album to date. From the off, the opening title track (and lead single) makes it obvious that this is an album focussed on Feist’s voice and guitar. There are long passages of this album which have little else, and even when she’s joined by bigger and broader arrangements, the instruments ease themselves into shadowy margins, modestly gathering around her. Sometimes you barely notice them sneak in.
All the same, Pleasure has more warmth and colour than its predecessor, and she’s regained a degree of playfulness. Metals felt very much like its name: a smooth sheen; an uninterrupted plain. Pleasure rises, falls, breathes and moves. From bluesy stomps to fragile vulnerability, she manages to couple a sustained atmosphere with plenty of musical contrast. Sure, you couldn’t set any of this to videos of jazz-hands and sequin pantsuits, but there are still climaxes as powerful and ambitious as those on songs like ‘1234’, albeit not as expressly uplifting.
Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that Pleasure is at its best when at its smallest. Feist has always been a stunning guitarist, but this has generally come across more strongly in concert than on record. No longer. With the arrangements stripped back, she’s never sounded more commanding. You get a sense that every song is a live take - giving a clear mental image of Feist sat with a guitar in front of a mic laying down the track; expressive flourishes of guitar skipping spontaneously through the choruses, little variations in emphasis rising to meet key phrases of lyric.
This strong sense of performance and authorship is is why Pleasure is arguably the equal to Feist’s benchmark The Reminder, although a very different sort of record. The Remainder was like a playground of sound - moving through different textures, tones and rhythms, Feist fitting herself into them with aplomb at every turn. On Pleasure, the songs accommodate Feist’s presence, not the other way about. It’s the work of a confident, mature songwriter with a clear and distinct voice. And we should all be thankful that she’s making albums like this, rather than wasting her time chasing that second big single.
Wed May 03 08:20:20 GMT 2017The Guardian 80
(Polydor)
Feist’s pared-back new album isn’t one of those ladylike confessionals that too many female singer-songwriters put out. Combining the creak, hiss and slamming doors of near-DIY recording with the unexpected rattle of early PJ Harvey (on standout tracks like Pleasure), the Canadian artist spends 11 songs examining her recent past, sidestepping easy cliches. That’s not to say that the album isn’t accessible – I Wish I Didn’t Miss You packs a chorus and a very relatable sense of vulnerable frustration – but these songs about maturity and internal toughness often move in mysterious ways, leaving plenty of space for Feist’s probing guitar work and an atmosphere that really breathes. Any Party stands out in this company, meanwhile, for having a Dylan-ish bent and the shock of musical flesh on its bones.
Continue reading... Sun Apr 30 07:00:22 GMT 2017Pitchfork 77
In a bizarro universe, Leslie Feist is a fool’s idea of a one-hit wonder—a distinctly aughts success story about the power of digital music providers, ad syncs, and viral videos in breaking quirky Top 10 hits like “1234.” Feist had her chance to take the iPod money and run, but instead of succumbing to her poppier sensibilities—which always felt more like a mask she put on when she wasn’t soothing her melancholy—she dug in deeper on her salt-of-the-earth soulfulness and relaxed-fit rock-guitar chops with 2011’s Metals. Her breakout masterpiece The Reminder made Feist a platinum-selling star in her native Canada, but Metals showed she was not terribly interested in the part. Instead, the one-time Broken Social Scene member was focused on the thoughtful long game, one she continues to play with no particular rush or agenda here on her fifth LP.
Pleasure features a number of songs that stretch towards the five-minute mark, making more sense as part of the whole rather than individually. The title track and “Century” position the album as Feist’s most overtly rock’n’roll record—the former resembling PJ Harvey in her prime, the latter upping the unf before Jarvis Cocker swaggers in, both with one of those triumphantly noisy choirs Feist grew fond of on Metals. The playful French pop, electronic flourishes, and jazzier inclinations that set apart her early work from the indie-pop pack are downplayed across the record, but a number of her signatures remain.
More than half the songs employ nature-related wordplay as a means of gauging relationships and changing mindsets, though the put-a-bird-on-it-ness is not as pronounced as on other Feist albums (she’s trying to cut down). The most striking example arrives with “The Wind,” which begins a little like an Arthur Russell tune, all lo-fi beats and ragged chords. Occasionally her head-in-the-clouds poetry about gaining perspective over time lands on straightforward realizations, as Russell’s often did; “I’m shaped by my storming like they’re shaped by their storming,” she sings, the sound swelling with a lovely horn undercurrent from Colin Stetson. Like many songs on Pleasure, the melody takes time to unfurl before loosely fading out.
These quieter moments are the ones that work best. “Baby Be Simple” is as tender as Feist gets—just an acoustic guitar and a humble plea to take it easy on her, the woman who once declared her ability to feel it all. Pleasure reminds you that Feist’s simmering introspection is the ideal vehicle for the more delicate facets of her voice. She can still surprise with a quick shift from cocked-hip talk-singing to yelps of fury, but her high range breaking through a dark sky like the sun remains the most stunning view.
Continuing to work with fellow Canadian ex-pat Mocky, Feist’s musical arrangements have grown slipperier and more subtle. “Any Party,” with its acoustic riff straight out of a Kinks song, slows way down and drops out almost entirely, eventually building up to a whimsical, barroom singalong. These songs don’t move how you expect them to, and that’s part of their appeal—or the frustration if you’re looking for the pared-down immediacy of The Reminder. Occasionally her “just trust me” approach makes way for a big risk that doesn’t always pay off. She sets up “A Man Is Not His Song,” a folksy ode to the fallacy of songs as diary entries, with field audio of crickets and a passing car radio playing “Pleasure,” then ends it with a snippet of Mastodon’s “High Road” as a comment on the femininity/masculinity at work. It’s a playful idea (and perhaps an inside joke with former collaborators), but it’s jarring and doesn’t fit the album’s easy flow.
On Pleasure, Feist faces middle age with a slow-burning ruckus. She accepts that getting older is growing comfortable with knowing you'll never have all the answers. And she savors the ride nonetheless—like she says, pleasure is what we’re here for—because this is it, this is life. When she finally wonders, on the swirling torch song that closes the record, “When they cart me away, will I say that I died already years ago?” we know the answer. Feist may have hidden away for a while and thought about giving up music before making this album, but a decade since she broke through, she’s settling in like a long-distance runner staring down the horizon she knows will outlast her. She will quietly make her mark in the meantime.
Thu Apr 27 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 40
Feist
Pleasure
[Interscope; 2017]
Rating: 2/5
“My aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.”
– Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Millennial pink won’t warm over. “The color keeps on selling product,” as Lauren Schwartzberg at New York wrote in a profile of the color last month. And now, the tone of Paris Hilton Juicy sweat suits and fuzzy Clueless pens, as vivid as ever, adorns the cover of indie powerhouse Leslie Feist’s first album in six years, Pleasure, which depicts someone in a pink dress leaping through a portal to a place called PLEASURE. The door resembles the entrance to a Williamsburg watering hole that charges $10 for the fries and then $4 for the ketchup: when you step inside, Pleasure is playing on the jukebox. When you walk out, you’re broke, and you don’t feel good.
Some of my favorite pop songs give pleasure; others critique it. The best do both, thrilling me with sonic invention but also making me rethink why I buy, steal, and beg for the things I do: Janelle Monae’s ongoing reworking of the audiovisual, which sends my senses spinning. Annie Clark’s gloriously icy performances of withholding, making me wonder what gender is. Or Jenny Hval’s quivery, questioning falsetto, singing of a pleasure that provides relief from the inequalities caused by someone else’s excess.
Meanwhile, Feist spins milquetoast relationship yarns and loudly brands them catharsis (cf. “Hard Feelings: A Conversation With Feist”). The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable. Over-driven guitar and top-notch PR do not a blues singer make.
With the money used to hire the gardener for the album cover’s hedge, Feist could have paid a poet double. Take “Any Party,” its rhyme and meter unbearably straight, where the central conflict is that a poor little rich girl can’t call her boyfriend because he turned his ringer off. She forgives him in the end, telling him: “You know I’d leave any party for you/ There’s no party as sweet as our party of two/ I’m getting tired of these clowns and balloons/ You know I’d leave any party for you.” She really would leave the party for him, and we know because she says so more than 10 times.
In an attempt to inject some grit into the album’s content, The New York Times has praised the album’s songs as “borderline crude with shame and despair” (a compliment); NPR describes the title track as “swinging back and forth between elegance and nastiness,” a decent, if overblown, ad campaign. For a certain audience, “nastiness” retains an empowering resonance, a ticket to middlebrow feminine transgression — though, to paraphrase the writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, most people rushing to reclaim the term “nasty” are, in fact, only rushing to claim it.
In the nicest nasty way, Feist says in an
The vision it took to let that tape hiss linger in the mix: it’s not the retromanic, pseudo-edgy, contrivedly Authentic™ recording aesthetic that America wants. No, it’s the one we need.
This courage led Feist to recently tweet, of the album: “I was raw and so were the takes.” It’s peculiar to me that a modern recording project with access to every audio gadget since the wax cylinder could fail to mask noise and deem it some kind of anti-style, but this is the same microsystem that permitted Feist to tweet that, much to her “surprise,” NPR had leaked word about the release of Pleasure, which in turn led NPR, in subsequent coverage, to refer back to the initial breaking of that announcement as “amusingly, to the surprise of Leslie Feist herself.” Hm. I’d think a team booking international tours would remember to tell the most important employee of their brand that her album release would be announced the next morning.
The hype-cycled innocuousness of Feist’s “raw” persona is what enabled The New York Times, in their profile, to write sincerely of her “inner burdens,” a dramatic emotional weight that surely only a grown-ass person who claims she “thrived as an underdog,” and whose tour schedule includes Harvard University, could afford to posture to bear. Of the creative process for the album, the singer said: “I wanted to make sure it was a legitimate drive, coming from a really honest and humble place, not because it’s what I do.” Circling past disavowal back to naïveté, this earnest confession of pure motives left me puzzled: is the lady working us or herself?
Pitchfork holds a straight face when it writes of the singer’s “sublime austerity,” maybe not having visited her web storefront, which offers shoppers an “autographed vintage guitar” ($600) or autographed beechwood headphones, sold as part of the “Pleasure Deluxe Package” ($200).
Later, as I imagined that Pleasure Deluxe Package, nestled snugly inside its custom wood box, I got less wet. And when I listened closely to “Baby Be Simple,” its song form obediently enacting its title, I vomited, just a little bit, in my mouth. When I spat it in the sink, I looked at my bile — it was millennial pink, and it cost me absolutely nothing. I am raw and so is the take.