Feist

• Genre: Baroque Pop
• Hometown: Toronto
• Feist Website

About

If Call and Response's Carrie Clough is the Nick Drake of indie rock, then Leslie Feist is the Colin Blunstone. Her voice has that warm, buttery ooze that melts down the microphone with the same gentle timbre heard on Blunstone's "Caroline Goodbye." Feist's musical history maps out almost as nomadically as her own travels. She cut her pearly whites in a Calgary punk band called Placebo (not to be confused with the eyeliner-and-nail-polish-wearing British guys) and got to play her very first show opening for the Ramones after winning a battle of the bands contest while still attending high school. Needless to say, that show changed her life. She spent the next half-decade touring in a van and screaming her voice out -- literally. Medical doctors told her that she would never be able to sing again, but doctors say a lot of things. She relocated to Toronto and hibernated for half a year with a guitar and a four-track, honing her layering skills to a razor-like sharpness. The guitar replaced her voice for a while, and she dove deep into barbed pop architecture, later playing guitar for (and touring with) By Divine Right. Working with a voice specialist over the years paid off and in 1999 Feist recorded her first solo album, Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head). A year later she moved in with Vice Magazine poster girl Peaches and opened up for the electroclash artiste on her first American tour. After that, she joined Broken Social Scene for their second album and toured the U.S. and Europe with them before cranking out her sophomore album, Let It Die, in Paris with Chilly Gonzales and Renaud Letang in 2004. Her solo material can be categorized as indie pop, but Feist balances sophisticated baroque styling with a trip-hop derivative of her own invention that weaves in and out of classic folky frameworks while her ethereal vocals layer over one another in gossamer harmonies. When she plays solo, Feist is the master of the looping effect pedal. She'll strum her electric guitar and catch a riff on it and then pick out a catchy arpeggio to stack on top before looping up to five layers of her heavenly vocals to sound like a one-woman pop symphony. If you see her listed in the pages of your local alt weekly, do yourself a favor and throw down whatever cover they're charging to see her. You will be moved.

- Eric Shea