FeistThe Reminder
Listen: This is exactly the kind of music you want them selling at Starbucks. Leslie Feist used to call herself Bitch Lap Lap and roll with the chick who sang “Fuck the Pain Away.” If that’s not reason enough for you to love hearing her voice bounce off those imperialist walls, then the fact that her breakthrough album contains more wit and intelligence than any given three seconds Paul McCartney has recorded in 30 years will have to do. She might have gotten a huge push from an iPod commercial, but it wouldn’t have helped if “1234” hadn’t been such a killer song to begin with. (An iPod commercial alone sure didn’t make a career for, say, The Caesars.) Notice how “1234” marries so many disparate elements—the vocals’ exuberant theatricality with the banjo picking and the brass band—and ends up with something precious that still manages to unfold itself more and more over time. The rest of The Reminder also brims over with ideas. “Intuition” begins with Feist quietly questioning her choice to have left a lover and ends with a chorus of people asking the same questions in a powerful moment of community and isolation. “Sea Lion Woman” begs for about a billion club remixes. She rarely repeats herself. But when she does, she comes up with “I Feel It All” and “Past In Present”—arguably the two best songs on the album. This is exactly the kind of music you want in the hands of the populous. If it’s hawked by monolithic corporations, well, then it’s making those corporations better by association. You know what else they sell at Starbucks? Coffee. You still like coffee, don’t you?
Feist's Official Site
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