CD Review: Feist

Metals (Cherrytree/Interscope)

Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 4:00 am

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The gulf between Leslie Feist's great tunes and forgettable misses rivals that of a singles artist. Her songs don't grow on you; you either get them the first time around or you never do. But her "hits" sound different and busy, bustling to break free of the static soft-rock prisons of her albums. Her breakthrough, 2007's The Reminder, is so deviously sequenced that the bland stuff probably slipped past you. Metals is more problematic because there are no standouts here. The sweetly sung "Caught a Long Wind" and mock-swamp "The Bad in Each Other" almost get there, but they're foiled by grossly overbearing orchestrations that obstruct her songwriting. Forget the indie-rock cred, and all that separates Metals from a Norah Jones album is that the latter occasionally drops a jazz chord for dissonance. — Dan Weiss