POP/ROCK
Feist, "Multitudes" (Interscope)
"Fear … fearless … oh fear … fearlessness," Feist sings in "Forever Before," from her new album. She overdubs herself into a whispery choir while distortion looms behind her: tranquillity shadowed by disquiet.
In "Forever Before," the Canadian singer-songwriter, 47, contemplates a new beginning and a lifelong commitment: "What's gotta end for forever to begin," she sings. That commitment is the one she made when she adopted a daughter, Tihui, in 2019. "She's sleeping right over there," the song concludes. It's one of the album's many, sometimes fleeting, moments of reassurance in dire times.
In the folky, calypso-tinged "The Redwing," Feist offers a kind of credo for the album: that both song and birdsong, direct from nature, are glimpses of truth. And in "Song for Sad Friends," Feist assures those friends that she would never condescend to tell them not to be sad.
"Multitudes" is Feist's sixth studio album, and it embraces both delicacy and impact. It's at once her most intimate-sounding and her most ambitious set of songs. Many of the tracks are hushed, close-miked ballads that can verge on ASMR — which happens to be ideal for Feist's tremulous, nearly weightless voice, often accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, sometimes completely a cappella.
"Multitudes" doesn't stick to lullabies. Every so often — beginning with "In Lightning," the album's stomping, swerving opening track, which celebrates the power of nature — the music erupts, loud and percussive and willful. "I Took All of My Rings Off" — a mystical fantasy of geometry, creation and self-discovery — transforms itself from acoustic parlor music into cavernous electronica. And in "Borrow Trouble," Feist unleashes full-fledged, totally unexpected screams.
In her latest songs, Feist is, once again, rethinking what love means. She quietly muses over the limits and possibilities of human connection in "Love Who We Are Meant To" and "Hiding Out in the Open." Then she extends love to encompass universal female solidarity in "Of Womankind."
