Artist: Feist
Album: The Reminder
Label: Cherrytree/Interscope
Year: 2007
Reviewed by: Woodstock Slim
I listened to The Reminder all the way through. My mouth agape all the way. Being infamous with my friends for disliking generic female voices and artist, I stood back in my mind. The Reminder was the most original album concept and compilation of songs put forward as an album I have ever heard. Although Leslie Feist is not my favorite artist ever, this album is without any doubt the best album I have ever heard. I still listen to it at least four/five times a week. That never happens to me. I don't have a music library on my PC where songs can repeat ad nausium. I have to literally put it on, make the effort, like with records in the old days.
The Reminder gave me hope again. It pulled my attention away from listening to Garage, Surf and Rockabilly which is quite impossible to do, so there. Now my wife thinks I'm deep and sensitive and not as brutish as I think I might be. These days, when I'm waiting round for someone and its quiet, I click my fingers and sing "Brandy Alexander" and sway from side to side, tapping my foot to pick up the beat. I was surprised that I could reach those notes, its hard but I get close. I have a waiting song. People who don't smoke or pace or fidget or talk to people they don't know... have waiting songs. (read MacKenzie Wilson's Feist Biography)
"Sea lion" was the first song I heard from this album when my co-host played it on our radio show The Unhappy Hour Show. I knew I was going to love the rest of the album. I think all her skill as a composer and guitar player and singer came together in this poster child of a track. Writing this review the album is on it's third trip round and I have now way of stopping it to put something else on. The only album that came close to knocking Feist's The Reminder from the best album spot this year is Blanche with their album "Little Amber Bottles." Very, very close in second place but there is still four months of the year left, lets see...
