| · Local girl makes good.
Forget that Leslie Feist was once in local band Placebo. And don't hold her Toronto years in By Divine Right and Broken Social Scene or her first solo outing against her, either. She has since moved to Paris and grown up.
Canada has an international reputation for folk-jazz-pop chanteuses, and although the reputation is not always flattering (for every Joni Mitchell or Mary Margaret O'Hara there are several Celine Dions or Diane Kralls), it's clearly one of those essentially Canadian things that the CBC likes to celebrate. And the CBC will have a field day with Feist. Let It Die may preserve faint traces of North American indie-rock attitude, but it's really the sort of well-crafted and intelligent mainstream songwriting that has become so rare we no longer even associate it with the mainstream.
While Fairground Attraction, kd lang, early-Everything But The Girl and even Sade are obvious influences (with Mitchell and O'Hara less audible), Feist has no trouble imposing her own personality on the genre. It’s not as romantic as A Girl Called Eddy and not as interesting as Sidsel Endresen, but self-confidently articulate, with consistently strong and admirably functional songwriting. Of course, when one is aiming for a "classic" sound, one doesn't want to get too distracted by passion or originality, and in this perhaps we can find a connection to Feist's earlier work – like the garage rock of the '90s, Let It Die's jazz-pop is less concerned with self-expression (still less self-knowledge) than with self-identification, placing the singer in a pre-approved legitimizing context (being "cool"). As such, Let It Die is a success by any measure, commercial or artistic.
|
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.