Rightfully, Feist’s beautiful new album The Reminder is an homage to the elemental. “The Moon,” “The Water,” and “The Park” are all invoked along with simple numbers (“1234”) in its titles, and its whip-smart pop tunes often come bathed in the sound of clip-clopping footsteps and chirping birds. It makes sense, given that the most basic ingredients—a scratchily strummed acoustic guitar, a thumping piano figure, a sensuously repeated phrase or a simple melody—are all Leslie Feist seems to need to be completely transfixing. Feist rarely exceeds a breathy whisper when she sings, but she does so with delicious flourishes, tip-toeing coyly across her phrases the way Joni Mitchell might have if she’d been a Parisian lounge singer. The charms here are obvious ones—incisive lyrics, near-perfect arrangements and a pleasant feeling of natural wear which frames the album’s intimacy. But the fact that Feist can sing a line like “smile at the man when you wake up in his bed” without any traceable cynicism is more to the point. She’s like the Mary Poppins exception to the hipster set: a singer who hasn’t let her intelligence poison the value of a good love song, and whose sadness always comes wrapped in a kind of whimsy. Simply put, this is one of the year’s best records.
