Album review: Feist gets back on track with Multitudes
Feist, who has just released Multitudes, on stage at Cork Opera House during the 2019 Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival.
- Feist
- Multitudes
- ★★★★☆
Leslie Feist has had an up-and-down relationship with Ireland. The Canadian indie folk singer was a highlight of the 2019 Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival, where she dazzled at Cork Opera House.
But last year was caught up in the controversy of Arcade Fire and accusations of sexual misconduct against singer Win Butler (which he has denied) when she opened for the band at 3Arena. She played both shows and then felt that she could not continue the tour, which was moving on to the UK.
The debacle robbed Feist’s audience of a first listen to the strange, sublime and devastatingly wistful material that comprises her first record in five years. Multitudes contain a great deal and is, in the first instance, a sublime diaristic chronicling of the singer’s complicated pandemic.
It’s a story that began months before lockdown when she adopted her daughter Tihui. Two years later, she lost her father, the artist Harold Feist. All of that is channelled into the new LP, which starts with the keening imagery of 'In Lightning', “when the lightning flashes flash… and the thunder loves me back”.
Multitudes is not an attempt by Feist to reclaim the pop status she accumulated, essentially by accident, when her song '1234' was featured in an Apple commercial a decade and a half ago. As a product of the scrappy Toronto indie scene (she is now resident in LA), she had never set out to become famous and wasn’t particularly thrilled to find herself in the spotlight.
In that context, the new album feels like a bid to remain below the radar. It’s searing, sometimes sleepy – and there’s only one real sing-along song, the swelling, orchestral 'Borrow Trouble'. That’s as close as the project comes to the high-octane whimsy of '1234'. Feist is instead dancing to her own code – and it’s a journey her fans will be thrilled to join her on.
