Live: Feist @ Apollo

26th March 2012

Apollo

9/10

Making a big room feel intimate is less a trick and more of an art form as far as live music’s concerned. Maybe it’s her largely reserved musical style, perhaps it’s that she was playing the 300 capacity Academy 3 when she toured her last record, but for Leslie Feist, the Apollo seems absolutely cavernous.

All the more incongruous is that she plays her largest Manchester show to date in support of an album that seemed a little lost in the mire on release back in October of last year; minimal promotion saw Metals fail to make a major chart impact in Britain, as it did with a top ten placing across the pond. Not that it isn’t merited. Metals is comfortably her most adventurous work to date and is aired tonight almost in its entirety. The thudding drums of opener, ‘Undiscovered First’, the eerie refrain of ‘A Graveyard’ and ‘How Come You Never Go There”s riff-driven breakdown all seem tailor-made for bigger live arenas, making the Canadian’s concessions to the Apollo’s size all the more charming. Her seven-piece band are huddled in the centre of the stage so as to be as close to the crowd as possible, and so confident is she with the inter-song banter that she even makes an ill-advised reference to the evening’s football. Older tracks appear largely in reworked form, with mixed results; an unrecognisable ‘Mushaboom’ doesn’t land as she might have hoped, but a stomping, rockier rendition of ‘My Moon My Man’ certainly does.

The evening’s highlight is saved for the encore – a tremendous cover of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Sometimes Always’ with the supporting M. Ward – and as much as she might want us to think otherwise, rooms of this size are where Feist now belongs.

Feist – How Come You Never Go There