On the experimental opener »In Lightning« on Feist’s sixth album, the tribal drums and siren-like vocals invariably suggest that Leslie Feist has finally channelled her inner Björk. But the song is a bit of a red herring, since »Multitudes« turns out to be the 47-year-old Canadian and newly adoptive mother’s quietest, most fragile and intimate work to date.
With delicately plucked acoustic guitars, almost bereft of drums and, of course, with her characteristic voice always at the centre of the twelve new songs and occasionally extending to a choir, »Multitudes« negotiates themes such as motherhood and Mother Nature, companionship among women and death. Sometimes, as with »The Redwing«, things get almost too cosy and move towards nursery rhymes or lullabies as with earlier songs.
But they still exist, the idiosyncratic, unpredictable moments: for example, when old, stripped-down synths sound on »I Took All Of My Rings Off« or when she sings about how we will all literally become compost one day on »Become The Earth«. And here we come full circle to Björk, who is never stingy with metaphors about nature and, for example, sings that she needs a lover as much as a virus needs a host.
Multitudes
