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Leslie Feist is an artist at a crossroads. With a musical resume that boast collaborations with Peaches and Broken Social Scene, the 31-year-old songstress has long been a leading player in the burgeoning Canadian underground. However, following the release of 2004’s breakthrough album, 'Let It Die', and the subsequent commercial endorsements that followed, the Calgary native soon found herself thrust into the consciousness of a more mainstream audience. Quite whether she was ready for such a leap forward is a moot point, but, as she emerges to a sell-out audience at London’s Scala here tonight, there’s an increasing sense that she isn’t feeling the burden of such mercantile expectation.
Indeed, whilst here to promote new album, ‘The Reminder’, Feist begins by choosing to indulge in the Cherokee-flavoured whooping of ‘Let it Die’s ‘When I Was A Young Girl’. With a lolloping bass underscoring a sharp Moricone-style guitar-line, it’s a thrilling start to the proceedings but one that ultimately leaves much of the audience feeling cold.
Thankfully for some, recent single ‘My Moon My Man’ soon follows to lighten the mood, contrasting a pounding piano motive with a lilting vocal. Perhaps taking its cues from Goldfrapp, the track sees Feist in full-on diva mood, enticing and exciting in equal measure with her sultry strutting and frantic shadowboxing.
But whilst the audience seems game enough – singing harmonies on cue and indulging the artist’s many flights of fancy – one gets the feeling that the majority are here for one thing and one thing only. Indeed, as the hit single ‘Mushaboom’ is finally unleashed, cheers of appreciation sound out around the auditorium prompting clusters of happy-clappers to openly whoop with joy.
To see such immediate reaction following a relatively muted response to more recent and worthy tracks – most notably the outstanding ballad ‘The Limit To Your Love’ and the delightfully slight ‘The Park’ – is slightly disheartening, but Feist seems unperturbed. In fact, on the alt-country stomp of ‘Past Is Present’ she seems pleasantly secure in the knowledge that, regardless of her recent popularity, she ultimately remains a commercial outsider. There’s "so much past inside my present" she sings on the song’s refrain, delivering the lyric with an authority that not only feels genuine but, perhaps more importantly given the circumstances, also reassuring.
And she has a point, for, whilst chart success makes comparisons with fellow female songsmiths such as Katie Tunstall or Norah Jones inevitable, it is Feist’s bona fide indie credentials and attitude that not only remain one of her key draws but continue to distinguish her from the rest of the pack. And that, in light of the title of her recent LP, serves as a timely reminder of her very special talent.
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