Feist - Pleasure

Once the most cheerful woman in alternative music, Leslie Feist continues the evolution line of her sound with a much more raw take in her new single, Pleasure. If Metals saw here at her more instrospective, this time we get to see her at her most empowered. It is a simple track that just consists of her singing some harmonies over a bassline, growing to a crescendo, but it's Feist allowing herself to be dissonant, to be agressive, to call the shots.

Her new track has drawn her close to a PJ Harvey sound (and attitude) that is a 180 degrees turn from the twee pop of her first albums. But more than showing her maturity, it also shows her agency, by making a track devoted to Pleasure, she defies old norms about what women are allowed to talk. It has very sexual connotations, but she keeps it elegant all the time, she doesn't sexualizes herself, she just tells the world that she is having pleasure, and she knows that it is a shared responsibility, it's an act where the more you give the more you receive, because pleasure is better when both parts are compromised to it.

But even at her rawest, Feist has an ability to still sound warm, her voice is radiant and knows how to inflect it to maximize the power of her words. It's she, enjoying being in her flesh, far away from the optimistic shyness of The Reminder and the melancholic introspection of Metals. If once she educated little kids on how to count to 4 in Sesame Street, no she is educating us, grown kids, on how to maximize our pleasure.