Sometimes you experience incredible musical epiphanies. I experience them all the time frankly. Not only in music as a whole, (it's the most astonishing gift to humanity that I know of personally), but these last few weeks especially have been the most incredible period for new releases and rediscoveries for myself that I can think of for quite a while.
Anyway, back to this epiphany. It happened at around about 8 o'clock yesterday morning about a minute into I Took All of My Rings Off, the sixth track into Multitudes, Feists' latest album.
Feist, or Leslie Feist if you prefer, was in the process of spinning herself into a trance. This is what she does repeatedly for much of the course of Multitudes, it seems to work well for her as a basic method for success, Repeating the title of the track until it became an intensely meaningful moment in life, the apparently insignificant writ large until it comes to have an overwhelming spiritual intensity beyond words themselves.
The record doesn't start well. Or it didn't for me anyway. With some drum thumping and massed orchestrated vocals, straight off Kate Bush' wondrous The Dreaming, such an increasingly influential record that one. In Lightning the opener, is by far my least favourite thing on the record and if it had carried on in that vein I wouldn't have lasted long.
Fortunately it gathers momentum and by I Took All of My Rings Off, it reaches a peak that it maintains 'til it hits the run out groove. Feist has a formula. As I suggested just now it seems to be this. Like Van on Astral Weeks she zeroes in on a seemingly insignificant detail and riffs at it until you get a hint of the sublime.
This was Uncut Magazine record of the month last month. Uncut know. They've been studying this stuff long enough. Feist takes her time as a solo artist. This is only her fifth album since she set off with her debut in 1999. 'These things take time', as a misery guts once warbled.
I know nothing of Feist really. A couple of friends when I mentioned her tried to fill in a bit of her background and pointed me to other records of hers that I should listen to. For the moment I don't care. I'm happy getting to know Multitudes, better and that's enough to fill my horizons for now. I'll gather a greater perspective later. One record at a time.
So there are moments this reminded me of Kate. Times it reminded me of Joni. Of Weather Station. But Feist has her own thing. She's Canadian. A telling detail. The record apparently was inspired by two events. The death of a father and the birth of a daughter. Inspired is the word. Inspirational too.
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