FEIST
The Reminder
EMI
· New album from Canadian songstress makes music as if your life depended on it.
Nobody plays music as someone else dies. Outside of drugs and wanting to live, you’d think people would wish for their favourite song instead of beeps interrupted by occasional coughs. Of course, there’s nothing preventing your jackass cousin from turning on the radio so your grandma can die to The Black Eyed Peas "My Humps." That last song needs to be intimately personal, encapsulating ordinary triumphs and losses into a hummable hook. Feist’s The Reminder is full of these one last songs.
"1 2 3 4" squeezes so much bounce out of a plucked banjo and handclaps you want to stomp around in rain puddles, the swelling horn partway through a call to grab your galoshes. "Sea Lion Woman" brings Nina Simone’s "See Line Woman" into the house of electro-gospel. "Brandy Alexander" puts finger snaps and xylophones against an autumn dusk, the kind of reflective reprise demanding a stage. Lyrically, much of the album deals in post-relationship yearning involving lovers without last names. Feist’s full-bodied husk brushes the perfect emotional notes, while musically opening the songs up for personal ownership. The Reminder feels intimate and familiar as if it was shaped after your life. In each song is one last day.
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