Open Season: Remixes and Collabs

Feist has a varied musical background

The Canadian rock, pop and even rap singer Leslie Feist has a very interesting and varied musical background. After 5 years of singing in a high-school punk band Placebo (a namesake of the popular British rockers) her voice got badly damaged and she was recommended to forget about singing. Then Leslie took up the guitar and within a year became a guitarist in By Divine Right. Yet she did want to sing and in 1999 her debut album Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head) was released. In 2000 Feist started singing with the rapping band Peaches who christened her Feist Bitch Lap-Lap. Later she joined a band Broken Social Scene in recording their second album You Forgot It in People, which was released in 2002. By that time Leslie had already planned a second solo album and in May 2004 Let It Die was released on Arts & Crafts. This year Leslie and her producers felt that the audience did not get enough of her sophomore effort and released Open Season, a collection of remixes, collaborations, and other new songs. The record contains several remixes, which let the original songs sound in a new and unexpected way and Feist’s duos with some vocalists refining Open Season.

Open Season sounds different from its predecessor

Open Season offers quite a variety of songs some being simple piano ballads and others immense rock, disco and even hip-hop numbers. The K-Os version of Mushaboom may seem to some even better than the original, and the Do Right remix of Gatekeeper is also a great one, definitely different from the initial variant and adding agreeable features to it. There are a couple of songs from Let It Die turned into genuine rock tracks worthy of listening while traveling by car. The duet with Jane Birkin The Simple Story is a lovely song with its rich guitar chords and a wonderful chorus. All in all there are four vesions of the singer’s most successful hit Mushaboom each one making the song open from new planes for the remixes are performed with a great skill. Among the standouts are the opener One Evening with Gonzales’ superb solo piano, Snow Lion, magnificently performed with Readymade FC and a new composition Tout Doucement, presenting a more professional Feist with the guitar strings amazingly melodious. In spite of the fact that Open Seasondoes not have a lot of purely new songs it still sounds different from its predecessor and as far as the remixes are concerned they are the samples of a very good creative work.

A real masterpiece

Among the authors of the remixes on Open Season are such long time professionals as Postal Service, VV and Frisbee'd and due to them the record has resulted into a real masterpiece taking into account Feist’s talent as it is. Of course the idea of recording a collection of remixes is always a risky thing to do, but with Open Season there has been done such a great job that all the criticism has turned out to be positive. Leslie kept traveling from Canada to Paris and back while recording the album and the impressions of the frequent changing of climate and the surroundings are reflected on the new record by means of the unusual jazz elements, a more passionate singing and the variety of genres. Besides, Feist’s songwriting partner Gonzales together with other musicians introduced more drumbeats, added other instruments and some vocal effects, and each producer defined a certain emotional aspect of an original song to be developed or increased. The fans can be happy to expect a new album to come soon and for the time being Open Season is a nice reminder of what has been already done and a gentle hint at what may be waiting for us ahead.