CD reviews 10/9: Feist, the Bangles and Kid Creole and the Coconuts

Give Leslie Feist credit for not focusing solely on the coffee-shop folk pop she's so good at. On "Metals," the long-awaited follow-up to 2007's "The Reminder," Feist pushes at the edges of her sweet melancholy. She eschews perky pop -- there's no "1234" or "Mushaboom" here, although "Bittersweet Melodies" comes close -- in favor of quiet, focused ballads and drum-pounding, work-song-like chants. Several tracks, such as "Undiscovered First," begin as the former and end as the latter, and they're emblematic of the CD's conflicted personality, lyrically and musically.

Opener "The Bad in Each Other" sets the stage for an album about difficult love affairs. It begins with a thudding drumbeat, gets sweetened with strings and ends with horns and electric guitars blaring. A coffee shop would have to be awfully noisy for this song to pass peaceably in the background. By contrast, near-solo acoustic songs such as the closer, "Get It Wrong, Get It Right," sound all the more intimate, tender and pretty. But still conflicted.

STEVE KLINGE, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

In the 1980s, the Bangles were an all-girl garage band until "Manic Monday" and "Walk Like an Egyptian" painted them indelibly as pop eccentrics. They're grown-ups now, and their new album reflects that.

Made with the help of Matthew Sweet, a longtime collaborator of frontwoman Susanna Hoffs, it's a spare and occasionally stiff album that has more to do with, say, the Indigo Girls than the 1960s bands the Bangles (three of whose four original members remain) grew up worshipping. But some songs here, especially "Anna Lee (Sweetheart of the Sun)," feel like mature takes on youthful ideas.

And there's a glimmer of real ferocity on "Sweet and Tender Romance," the album's shortest and most convincing song, lean at just over two minutes, showing that the group hasn't forgotten all of the loose, mean charm of its prefame days, when looking backward felt like the newest thing. The Bangles perform Tuesday at the Fine Line in Minneapolis.

Acts truly deserving the label "ahead of their time" often earn it posthumously. New York's Kid Creole and the Coconuts were certainly a unique early '80s proposition: a Cab Calloway-esque, zoot-suited dandy leading a crack contingent, creating future-now, street-savvy-yet-club-fashionable blends of Latin, funk, Tin Pan Alley, jazz and tropical rock. They had one hit-making foot in the international pop world, and the other in the era's arty, underground downtown scene that included edgy No Wave artists and Sonic Youth's earliest stirrings.