| Feist- Metals |
| Written by Peggy Hogan | |||
| Wednesday, 14 December 2011 11:46 | |||
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 Feist comfortably ascended into the hearts of many Canadians as a national sweetheart after the release of her first studio album, Let it Die in 2004. Her career launched into household name status after her 2007 release, The Reminder, and the subsequent iPod Nano commercial featuring ‘1234’ the second single from the album. With considerably more notoriety under her belt, Feist returned this fall with her latest release, Metals.
Often when artists begin to reach much-larger audiences, their aesthetic turns more toward crowd pleasing; not so with Metals. The album maintains Feist’s folkloric approach to songwriting; it’s interested in setting a mood – serene, meditative - and yet manages to take the listener through a variety of emotional scenes and universes. The album’s lead single, “How Come You Never Go There?” combines barbershop-style harmony with evocative, but matter-of-fact lyrics. It’s laid-back and transparent in its emotional content, making it an interesting departure from conventional lead single choices that tend to be up-tempo and light in content. It’s the first of many indicators that Feist is sticking to her artistic guns with Metals, choosing to be almost the anti-thesis of pop hooks and “career-minded” songwriting. “The Circle Married the Line” is Metals’ most Broken Social Scene reminiscent track. The song swells and relaxes, combining quirky instrumentation in the verses, marked especially by a charming glockenspiel line, with more florid choruses, including some beautiful vocal harmonies. The cherry on top is the orchestral interludes that marry Feist’s vocals with all the richness of full string and brass sections. The album was recorded in Big Sur, and “The Circle Married the Line” captures the mood and landscape of this stretch of the California coast both instrumentally and lyrically. The first verse ends in “Then I’ll head out to horizon lines,/ Get some clarity ocean-side,” pairing up with the chorus, “First light was, last light was alright when/ The circle married the line.” The lyrics are just elusive enough to capture the feelings of isolation and insight that standing before an ocean can reveal. Overall, Metals is a striking album. It is darker in mood than Feist’s previous endeavours, and tends to leave more to her listener’s interpretation. The album aptly associates itself with a time and a place, and whether that time and place happens to be a winter spent in a Hoboken apartment, or a week in Santorini, well, that really depends on where you are when you press play.
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