Music PREVIEWS
POP/ROCK FEIST Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Tue 27 Mar
Leslie Feist isn’t the first artist to successfully balance the commercial exposure a ubiquitous hit song can yield with a desire for creative integrity and freedom. But not many manage it quite as gracefully as the Canadian has with her solemn and reflective fourth LP Metals.
The follow-up to 2007’s The Reminder – which notched over 2.5 million worldwide sales, thanks in part to the elementally catchy ‘1234’, of iPod advert and singing with Elmo on Sesame Street fame – Metals arrived last October, four years after its predecessor. Recorded following an 18-month break from music, in which Feist claims to have deliberately forgotten how to play her old songs, it’s a triumph of inventive downbeat country-rock and alt-folk that shrewdly strengthens her breakout appeal without sounding burdened by the need to write an obvious ‘1234’ hit. It’s allowed her draw as a live performer to normalise to the point where she can play smaller venues than those she toured last time round; trying to make her songs carry in arenas was an experience Feist admits to having taken only limited pleasure from.
She’s an ex-member of indie-rock hipster mafia Broken Social Scene and a former flatmate of delightfully dirty electro-clash queen Peaches, who counts as her chief collaborator Chilly Gonzales – an eccentric rapping piano maestro rarely seen out of his dressing gown and slippers. So Feist was hardly likely to go all Sheryl Crow on us, was she? Heartbreaking songs such as ‘The Bad in Each Other’ and ‘Get It Wrong, Get It Right’ are new landmarks in an idiosyncratic career, and the perfect forum for a voice with a tone as rich as the most precious of metals. (Malcolm Jack)
DUB/ELECTRONIC/EXPERIMENTAL HYPE WILLIAMS SWG3, Glasgow, Fri 23 Mar RETRO INDIE-POP SUMMER CAMP Captain’s Rest, Glasgow, Sat 17 Mar
The List once saw Hype Williams perform hidden behind a white bedsheet. It was like a Poundstretcher version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, with an added fug of skunk. The duo, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, revel in this sort of batshit chicanery almost as much as they enjoy making their engrossing bricolage of morphine drip-pop, oddball dub and chopped and screwed r’n’b. This crawl space they inhabit – part avant tunesmiths, part art school pomposity – is probably all part of their grand plan to deconstruct the idea of being a recording artist in the digital age.
And it works, on some levels. Hype Williams purposefully cultivate a kind of ‘tactical non-engagement’ with their fans. Early on, the London duo were a shadowy, anonymous concept with an annoying name to Google, drip feeding info. When they began to perform live, they did so in darkness or obscured, reinforcing this barrier. It’s not a new concept but it gave them that kind of haughty cool cachet they clearly desire.
It wouldn’t stand for much if their music wasn’t thoroughly engaging.
Last year’s One Nation LP, their third, is a lo-fi dubby comedown; at times maddeningly undercooked, but, nevertheless, a sonic curio of real redoubt. Their live show employs a similar tactics – a baffling aural blitzkrieg pockmarked with moments of rare intimacy and genre-melting oddness. And that’s just the music, beyond that is anyone’s guess. (Mark Keane)
Summer Camp: a duo so in tune with one another they respond to The List’s email questions as one entity. ‘How did you get together’, we ask. ‘We’d known each other for ages,’ Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey tell us in stereo. Then Elizabeth made Jeremy a mixtape that had ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ by The Flamingos on it. ‘We thought it would be fun to record a cover version, never thinking it would lead to us being a real band. Things just went from there.’ It’s still going – so successfully that Warmsley’s solo career (which produced two albums) has been on hiatus since 2009. Together with Sankey, also a voiceover artist and magazine writer, last year’s debut album Welcome to Condale created a sweet, sometimes bitter-hearted fantasy world based around the bubblegum pop and girl group styles of 50s and 60s America. ‘Condale is a small town to the east of LA,’ says Warmsley/Sankey of the album’s non-existent location, ‘just your usual suburban pocket of small-town tensions and dreams. We love the idea of America we got from films and TV shows growing up, this impossible place that’s as much a fantasy as Oz or Narnia.’ The English duo will be visiting it again with a new record this year; in the meantime let’s see them be perfectly old-fashioned and ‘put on a good show that leaves people feeling like they’ve enjoyed themselves.’ (David Pollock)
82 THE LIST 1–29 Mar 2012