Almost Not Quite 3

  Late 2011 Feist came out with her album Metals. It is an album I like quite a bit. More somber, a little darker than her previous efforts. There's also a living beat that fluctuates through all the songs on the record, as if at any time the bad is waiting for the cue to morph the melody into improvised Jazz. But for the most part things are more subtle.

   My problem, if I have one, is with the video for her song "Graveyard".  First of all I would like to say that I think most of Feist's music videos are beautifully shot, crafted and imagined. "Mushaboom" is a dream-like sequence where Miss Feist has a hard time keeping her feet on the ground, quite litterally, and her toast have acquired wings. The point is not that the video is whimsical and fun, which it is, but rather that it is and whimsical and well executed.

   In "I feel it All" she has gone for a night hike, only to come upon a hill with a series of metal barrels atop. Feist, seeing these mysterious barrels, takes the opportunity to choreograph a pyrotechnic show, tapping each barrel in turn to have fireworks spring forth.

   "Graveyard"on the other hand takes the chorus "Bring them all back to life"as a central theme, but not with the magic or "life" that is very much there in her other videos. We start with a grainy, gray-filtered landscape shot of an unremarkable field. The camera pans out further and further, leaving the musicians ant-like on the barren backdrop. Throughout the song other musicians pop into the landscape, some coming with shadows, others without. The introduction of each additional musician can be interpreted as a summoned ghost, called forth by the plea of "Bring them all back!". But these "ghosts" don't seem to have any life to them for two reasons: 1) the panned out camera which prevents seeing anyone very well 2) the digital method that the spectres are projected onto the field. Perhaps the overt digital effects combined with the chorus are showing how we have become trapped in our digital lives, chained to our computers. A message that we need a jolt to bring us back to life..But I don't know.

Feist
Graveyard