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2008-06-07
Sala Apolo
In the last few years no one has been making such credible, elegant pop music as Feist. Canada’s most successful recent export has been writing very listenable and fun yet interesting and heartfelt songs that I for one cannot stop listening. Both of her last two albums have been picked over by advertisers the world over and as a result her music has reached a massive audience and launched her, in North America particularly, into superstardom. Luckily for us Barcelonaites her status has not quite reached the point at which we are forced to see her in a gigantic arena but were instead offered the always fantastic Sala Apolo as the venue for her performance.
Her stage persona is very much in keeping with her music. Warm, inclusive and fully capable of mixing the fun with the serious she is excellent at delivering not just a great setlist but an actually fine performance. Perhaps one element to her music which really sets up her live act for such success is the fact that it is so emotionally diverse. From all out pop on her biggest hits like “1234” and “Mushaboom” to slow haunting and extremely affecting ballads like “The Park” and “When I was a Young Girl” and onwards to simply beautiful love songs, “The Limit to Your Love” and “Let it Die”.
With Feist also being an extremely talented musician with such a wealth of phenomenal material to draw upon, it would be difficult to deliver a truly duff performance. With the exception of one strange moment where, rather bizzarely, she wanted to get someone up on stage to sing the Spanish national anthem, which was met with a bemused silence from the largely Catalan crowd, she did not disappoint. She is not afraid to give the crowd what they want to hear, and so “1234”, the excellent “I Feel it All” and “Mushaboom” are a staple part of any set she plays. But neither does she allow her concerts to be constant reproductions of the night before, at times opting for acoustic versions of her much loved hits or ditching her band for solo performances.
Normally with an act like Feist, after such unexpected success, I would be worried about what fame might do to her musical output. However, as her down to earth performance and the consistency of her first three albums show, the only thing to worry about is how long we will have to wait for a repeat performance and whether she will still be performing in such small venues on the next occasion.
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