The Sweet Snob

I’m finally getting a chance to listen to the new Leslie Feist record, Multitudes.

I’ve long loved Feist, and her first two albums Let It Die and The Reminder are all-time classics in my house. Her songs were always simple, funny, romantic, relatable, and tragic to me.

Her early song “Brandy Alexander”, comparing her FWB to a rich, sweet cocktail made me want to try that cocktail for years, and by the time I had an opportunity I didn’t want to flood my system with all the lactose.

I must admit with each passing Feist album since The Reminder, I have listened less and less thoroughly as they’ve seemed more meditative and their themes less easy to understand.

Feist’s incredible keening voice is like no other, but it was always her funny, relatable songwriting that brought me back. The Fleet Foxes songwriting over the years always kept me coming back, but I always felt like Feist was slipping away from my understanding. The words of her songs never added up to something I’d return to.

Listening to Multitudes I am definitely enjoying it. Its songs are standing out more to me than the songs of Metals and Pleasure, but I’m not quite hearing anything I’d put on the “driving playlist” yet.

It’s definitely worth watching the two great music videos she’s put out in support of the album, especially “Hiding Out in the Open”, where she does some extremely clever green-screen trickery that gets more funny and inventive as the song goes on.

It’s not QUITE as awesome, but the video for “Borrow Trouble” is pretty great as well and has some similar psychedelic trickery and seems recorded in the same studio. The dancing and movements remind a person that she’s steeped in physical performance and once went by “Baby Lap Lap” when she toured with shock electroclash rapper Peaches and performed onstage with hand puppets.

Her “Multitudes Mini-Concert” doesn’t have quite as considered production, but still has a few clever visual ideas and is clearly performed in the same place:

Enjoy!

Revisited Björk’s Volta for the first time since it came out today. I definitely appreciate it more today than when it came out.

By the time it came out I’d been hanging on Björk’s every word for years. I knew every word of every one of her albums. Even though Medulla was a little bit of a rough listen, I really appreciated what she was doing to innovate here.

When Volta came out it seemed like she was a little out of ideas, and just being weird for weirdness’ sake. It was less grounded in traditional music than most of her albums and just felt like a pastiche of some of the weirder and harsher moments in Post and Homogenic. Also, songwriting-wise it just didn’t seem like the ideas were there.

Listening to it now, I can hear the ways it was ahead of its time, and was influential. Now I’ve also listened to MUCH MUCH weirder music than I had in 2007 and it doesn’t sound quite as out there anymore.

Even this dazed article calls it her “weirdest album”, which, was it even in 2017? Even in 2005 she had made the MUCH weirder Drawing Restraint #9. https://dazeddigital.com/music/article/35751/1/bjork-volta-ten-year-retrospective…

I still don’t love it, but I was able to enjoy it this time, instead of completely dismissing it.