33 rebellions per minute
1999
Feist, MONARCH
My impression is that truly orchestrating pop songs must be a very difficult task, to be approached with care and mastered only by veterans. Ambitious, calm arrangements are where people end up, eventually, _after_ Elvis Costello does his new-wave smartass thing, after XTC's sidewinding riffs and creepy keyboards set radios in motion and themselves on fire, after the Pernice Brothers play with country music and Beck plays with hip-hop and Elliott Smith plays with Heatmiser, who apparently made a fairly aggravating loud racket. Even then, in my opnion, it mostly takes them a few albums to do it right: XTC went through MUMMER and THE BIG EXPRESS before they got to NONSUCH and APPLE VENUS, and Costello didn't manage the showy, amused classiness of SPIKE until most of his fans had pretty much given up on him.
It's not clear to me if this debut by Leslie Feist is an exception to the rule or not. It's her first solo record, but she did sing and play guitar for a loud rock group called By Divine Right that probably released some records, and she does use "Feist" as an implied band name, not an individual one. The string quartet on MONARCH was arranged by one Dave Szigeti. The producer was her bassist, Dan Kurtz. The drummer, Josh Hicks, has a big expensive drum set and both the talent and restraint to use it tastefully. On the other hand, Leslie Feist is the leader here. She assembled these assistants, presumably not by accident, and she wrote the songs. And while the result isn't friendly in the Tommy Lasorda sense -- parody Italian, Dodger Blue and hugs for all you wonderful the-greatest people -- it was just inviting enough for me to keep listening, leaning in a bit closer. Treat it like that, and it comes to seem extraordinarily warm and open-hearted. As well as awfully goshdarn skillfully arranged.
Admittedly, I wish I was better at making out lyrics (or had a lyric sheet). The songs do mostly seem to be in the same here's-everything-I'm-feeling vein that I ranted about in my Julia Darling review, and do include a breakup song ("One Year A.D."), a hurt song ("That's What I Say, It's Not What I Mean"), and one song ("La Sirena") with an achingly intoned chorus of "You are the enemy/ you are the end of me". But even "…Sirena"s chorus comes across, to me, as a regretful statement of unavoidable fact, with no ill will implied to anyone. "That's…" seems like a friendly, useful warning. "...A.D." is a fond reminiscence, with "we know the spaces together/ and all the silences ever" cast as a benediction for experience. Meanwhile, MONARCH leads off with a song with the sweet, unfathomable chutzpah to call itself "It's Cool To Love Your Family" and narrative eye to describe various day-to-day scenes of her own relatives as anecdotal evidence -- so anti-rock'n'roll as to be punk by reverse psychology. "The Onliest" is a loving song to a dead friend that manages, untraditionally, to be more about the friend than about Leslie's reactions to his absence. She essentially duplicates this feat later, a couple times, writing about living people. "Still True" and "New Torch", meanwhile, are quietly daring, love songs used as flirtation, and even the confessional fear on "…Torch" is only mentioned on the way to being overcome.
Arrangement-wise, it centers around very attractive country-rock, but with many thoughtful embellishments. "...Family" is the obvious single, with fiddle, tambourine, the ringing heartland feedback of latter-day Soul Asylum, and a metallophone solo. "The Onliest" could be 2nd-album Lauren Hoffman, spacious echoing acoustic guitar in ¾ time, but the violins that join in are warm and enveloping even as just a teensy, intriguing amount of dissonance creeps in. "La Sirena" opens with theremin, the bass guitar rumbles and echoes and grunts, and the lead guitar's dual parts are heavily phase-shifted to hippieish weird effect. "...A.D." is a rock song, reformulating Nirvana's soft/loud dynamic for a yearning that somehow uplifts.
"Monarch" itself is Szigeti's true showoff moment: if he doesn't write chamber music in the rest of his time, he clearly could {Author's note: I used to attend quite a few recitals and thus sort of know what I'm talking about}. The string quartet's oblique but involving tunefulness functions superbly on its own for roughly half the song's seven minutes, but lets a smartly generic kick/snare beat guide it into and out of rock-rhythmic support mode. "That's…"'s soft guitar chords come with a friendly autoharp cadence, but the pedal steel part could almost persuade you that steel guitar is fundamentally associated with goth. "Flight #303" is basically a rock song decorated by the buzzing autoclave keyboards of '70's jazz-rock, but skips feyly into, then quickly out of, a quasi-Latino lilt that suggests Solex or Beck doing a cover of Jane Siberry's "Miss Punta Blanca". "Still True" opens so sparsely that we can hear Leslie gasp for breath between lines as she vaguely scrapes her guitar strings, and a many-layered accompaniment still ends up in a quiet but ceaselessly urgent attempt to make up the ground it keeps losing when she starts her next phrase ahead of it; her multiple vocals intertwine on the chorus, and the firmest grounding comes from a guitar that alternates chords from two different keys. "The Mast", aside from being Hicks's best (and still subtle) percussion display, suggests the 1963 Beatles attempting country music and, saved by excellent production, improbably succeeding. "New Torch" closes the album with a rhythmic cello guiding tricky meter shifts, a kettle drum booming the news, and low husky verses that, by the "take a trip with me" chorus, mutate into the purest Disney-epiphany melody I've ever heard actually work.
In other words, yeah, the arrangements are tricky. Yet not oppressively so, at all. If you want to let this album waft by gently, it's a lovely and friendly work of country-pop. If you listen more closely, it's art-rock of a sort Leslie shouldn't be old or experienced enough to pull off. And still lovely and friendly. Maybe this whole singing-about-feelings notion is less doomed than I thought.
MONARCH, if it's not yet available at www.hmv.com, may be ordered with a $12 (U.S.) check to
227 Bartlett Ave
Toronto, ON
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Canada
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