CD Review: Feist

Feist

Metals

(Cherrytree/Interscope)

Grade: B

Give Leslie Feist credit for not focusing solely on the coffee-shop folk pop that she's so good at. On Metals, the long-awaited follow-up to 2007's The Reminder, Feist pushes at the edges of her sweet melancholy.

She eschews perky pop – there's no "1234" or "Mushaboom" here, although "Bittersweet Melodies" comes close – in favor of quiet, focused ballads and drum-pounding, work-song-like chants. Several tracks, such as "Undiscovered First," begin as the former and end as the latter, and they're emblematic of Metals' conflicted personality, lyrically and musically.

Opener "The Bad in Each Other" sets the stage for an album about difficult love affairs. It begins with a thudding drumbeat, gets sweetened with strings, and ends with horns and electric guitars blaring. A coffee shop would have to be awfully noisy for this song to pass peaceably in the background. By contrast, near-solo acoustic songs such as the closer, "Get It Wrong, Get It Right," sound all the more intimate, tender and pretty. But still conflicted.