The Village Voice slammed its "overall tenor of emotional feebleness and submission" while unfavorably comparing Feist to spiky former alt-rock heroines Liz Phair and Courtney Love. Take away the blue sequins, Gap dancers, and rainbow Nano-ization, and "1234" basically counts up the years until "money can't buy you back the love that you had then." For passers-by, Feist could be chalked up as a Lilith leftover, an Enya-style new age balm for our Crackberried brains. This is anti-cynic music made by a woman flighty enough to call her house the Unicorn Ranch yet wise enough to lace her bouncy smash with semi-depressing nostalgia.
Of course, it's much more than that, as this timely reissue- coupled with a bonus disc filled with videos, remixes, demos, and rarities- um, reminds us. That third show exposed how The Reminder's modesty could work against it- how its no-frills profundity could be misread as a totally sweet Bed Bath & Beyond soundtrack. The experience was disappointing, though it wasn't Feist's fault. So the Hammerstein crowd- boisterous, bored, and oblivious- ignored her attempts at intimacy, waited for the song from the commercial, and then left soon after. By April, Feist was well into the victory lap stage of her Reminder stint- between the Apple endorsement, the one-take videos, and (oh yeah) the near-perfect batch of broken-hearted tunes tying everything together, she tapped into a mainline somewhere between your mom's Bose CD alarm clock and your Nano.īut even with the expanded fan base, The Reminder is big on music that's very tiny. Problems arose at a show this year inside NYC's cavernous Hammerstein Ballroom, though. She made a pool joke before starting "The Water" and she turned the concrete shell into a cozy sanctuary. The second, at Brooklyn's emptied McCarren Park Pool, was spacious, breezy, and yet still quaint. Her voice was pristine and her strands of festive lights hung down just so.
The first, at 87-year-old midtown Manhattan fixture Town Hall, was quiet, seated, and quaint.
Since The Reminder's release in May 2007, I've seen Feist play live three times. Coupled with a bonus disc filled with videos, remixes, demos, and rarities, this reissue of Feist's breakthrough record reminds us that before the Apple ads and YouTube hits, she recorded a near-perfect batch of broken-hearted tunes.
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