NYT has a worthy profile of Leslie Feist and her new album, ‘Metals’. The article is especially noteworthy in -that it takes on the ‘loudness wars’ and how Feist’s hand-crafted, human approach to recording yields rewarding results.
“Metals,” which is due for release on Oct. 4, simply ignores all the glossy, computerized, impersonal pop of the 21st century; it’s made for intimacy, not for mass-market broadcast. Fans had been waiting for it. When Feist’s new single, “How Come You Never Go There,” was released online on Aug. 12, it got as much attention as the likes of Kanye West and Jay-Z, topping popularity lists at sites like Pitchfork and the Hype Machine.
“I always think about how I’m in my room alone writing it, and eventually most people listen to music alone,” Feist said. “So there’s actually a quiet little direct line between writing and listening. It’s a strange bubble of solitude, because you’re linked, but you don’t know each other, yet you’re communicating.”
The album was hand-played and largely recorded live in the studio, with the dynamics of musicians performing together in real time. At a time when most pop recordings compete to maximize volume, “we make really soft records,” said Robbie Lackritz, her recording engineer and manager. “It draws you into the record a lot more. If we were making this record by modern-day digital standards, it would be really terrible sounding, because there are so many songs that have an arc from beginning to middle to end.”
The album has some of the hushed, lambent ballads that drew listeners to Feist’s previous albums, but it also gets unapologetically loud. Unlike her previous albums it opens not with a plaint but with a stomped drumbeat and a barbed electric-guitar line, with a song about a couple who bring out “The Bad in Each Other.”
