There must be something in the ether. Björk's website has twinkled with pictures of sparkly minerals in the run-up to her imminent album, Biophilia, riffing hard on the natural world as a musical resource.
Nature also plays a starring role in Feist's fourth album, the first in four long years from the Canadian singer, erstwhile member of Broken Social Scene and Peaches sidekick. There's a stark landscape on the cover of Metals, an album named for the malleable, ductile ores that lie deep down, ripe for transformation.
All this organic material is in marked contrast to Feist's hi-tech thumbnail portrait. "1234" was the iPod Nano tune that introduced her to a bigger audience. Her winsome third album, The Reminder, won the Shortlist prize and was nominated for a Grammy.
On Metals, by contrast, you can just about hear the dust motes swirling through the air. Recorded in California's Big Sur with minimal overdubs, it is an album full of rattles and thumps, breaths and handclaps; "Get It Wrong, Get It Right", the album's consolatory closer, seems to have a herd of grazing goats on it.
As a consequence, it feels wrong to listen to Metals as a computer download. Its quieter moments, such as the campfire tune "Cicadas and Gulls" and the self-explanatory "Bittersweet Melodies", require somewhere soft to curl up.
Its louder moments – and there are plenty – are even better and feature stomping incantations that demand air and company. The chorus of "The Undiscovered First" is about as close as Feist gets to a hoedown. "Is this the way to live?" demands the chorus, which features the rattle'n'holler of San Francisco's Real Vocal String Quartet (they sing as well as fiddle). The tune that most resembled a "1234" pop moment – "Woe Be", previewed on the website of Spin magazine – did not make the final album cut.
Rhythm is key to this subtle record. For all their elegance, Feist's gossamer hiccups can be as difficult to grab hold of as fistfuls of steam. All the percussion here – the galumphing beats and clacking typewriter on "The Bad in Each Other", a song about how nice people can't always be nice to one another – serves as counterpoint to Feist's feathery vocalising. Songs such as "How Come You Never Go There" and the subtle "Anti-Pioneer", meanwhile, have the gentlest swing of jazz to them. Overall, these songs vibrate on the ultraviolet spectrum: blue, but not blues.
Has Feist been unlucky in love? The press release that accompanies Metals alludes to a lyric of Feist's coming true over the course of her touring ("I'll be the one to break my heart," from The Reminder's "I Feel It All"). Even though Metals features one happy conjoining – "The Circle Married the Line" – on balance, Metals is full of iron filings that don't line up magnetically. People are out of synch, love is not "the light it was", and, in the album's killer blow, succour is hard to find: "When you comfort me/ It doesn't bring me comfort/ Actually."
