Feist
Throughout her new album Multitudes, 11-time Juno Award-winning artist Feist sets her observation on the countless ways we seek out or deliberately hide from the truth: searching the natural world for portents and good omens, pulling tarot cards and masking our true emotions to spare our loved ones from pain. From a lyrical honesty that’s as confronting as it is unguarded, Feist writes of “A crucible of apex events that brought life to a new temperature.” and of “A new dimension of self awareness that time and experience seemed to require.” Her sixth full-length and first release since 2017’s critically lauded Pleasure, Multitudes took shape soon after the birth of her daughter and sudden death of her father, a back-to-back convergence of life-altering events that left the Canadian singer/songwriter with “Nothing performative in me anymore.” As she cleansed her songwriting of any tendency to obscure unwanted truths, Feist slowly made her way toward a batch of songs rooted in a raw and potent realism which is touched with otherworldly beauty.
Largely written and workshopped during an intensely communal experimental show of the same name through 2021 and 2022, the songs developed in parallel with and were deeply influenced by the mutuality of the unconventional experience. Incorporating such elements as real-time video explorations of the audience, a subtle dramaturgical disarming of normalized conventions between performer and observer, and ATMOS surround sound, the “egalitarian theatre experiment”, created in collaboration with Rob Sinclair (Peter Gabriel, David Byrne) embodied an expansive, exploratory, and elegantly wayward sound that immediately invited a more receptive state of mind, and was lauded as “A work of genius.” (Toronto Star)