The first sound on Multitudes is, fittingly, Feist’s voice in harmony with itself. The singer-songwriter’s vocals are overdubbed and looped on songs like the opening “In Lightning” and, later, “I Took All My Rings Off.” The vocal arrangements suggest an uncanny valley incarnation of the Roches, as Feist’s harmonies are distorted and slightly out of sync.
At its best, Feist’s approach throughout Multitudes feels deeply intimate. For one, the guitar on “Forever Before” is barely present—so soft that it allows her voice to take center stage. And she often uses her guitar as percussion, carefully incorporating the sounds of her fingers on the fret board and the strings bouncing off of the body of the instrument.
Unlike on past albums like 2011’s Metals, the songs here are more memorable for their textures than their melodies. “I Took All My Rings Off” deploys 1970s prog-rock-style keyboards, while strings are used sparingly and subtly throughout. In the case of “Of Womankind” and “Borrow Trouble,” the sweeping orchestration evokes a ’50s Hollywood melodrama.
Despite Feist’s talent as a singer and musician, though, Multitudes fades too easily into the background. She attempts to grapple with serious subject matter on “Become the Earth,” which suggests that Earth’s cycles of life and death have been disrupted by “ash into ash, plexi and trash…landmark in Styrofoam,” and “Martyr Moves,” about working up the strength to leave a toxic relationship. But these tracks’ production and musical arrangements aren’t strong enough to withstand the gravity of their heady lyrical themes.
Just as Feist’s experimentation with self-harmonizing stops just short of true dissonance, Multitudes too often finds her holding back from expressing her pricklier emotions. The album eschews the extroversion of the singer’s best work, like her 2007 breakthrough, The Reminder, and ultimately struggles to fully elucidate her multifaceted talents.
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