With a production of six albums in 24 years, Feist is one of those artists who like to take their time. Result: the Canadian singer-songwriter never stops exploring, and each time manages to renew herself without distorting herself. This is again the case with Multitudes, which comes six years after its previous album Pleasure, and twelve years after it won the Polaris Prize for Metals.
It’s been a long time since Leslie Feist moved away from the charming indie-pop that propelled her among the most popular artists of the 2000s. But Multitudes is probably both her most stripped down and experimental album, with its quasi-folk songs that leave plenty of room for guitar-voice interpretations, its sometimes dissonant coatings and a panoply of strange sounds that dress it all up.
This may surprise you at first listen. The first track, In Lightning, sets the stage without compromise. But if we let ourselves be guided by the purity of this recognizable voice, and take the time to enter into his poetry which speaks of the passage of time and the state of the world, plugged into nature and the amount of contradictory emotions that inhabit each person – Feist once again proves here that she is an exceptional songwriter –, Multitudes is an enveloping and stimulating album, deep and moving.
Between the well-sent heartfelt cries of Borrow Trouble and the immense sweetness of Love Who We Are Meant To, passing through the incandescence of Of Womankind, the aerial lightness of The Redwing and the brilliance of Hiding Out in the Open, it There is as much beauty and sensitivity as there is intelligence and subtlety in this new album by Feist, which here seems to be at the top of its game.
At a time when AI seems able to create its share of prefabricated songs, Feist is in any case proving that its uniqueness, this mixture of inspiration, talent, reflection and human emotion connected directly to the heart, cannot be reproduced by a machine anytime soon.
