Review: Feist "Open Season"

Review: Feist "Open Season"

Feist "Open Season": Aidin Vaziri | When someone finally gets around to opening the museum of useless artifacts of the 21st century, remix albums will surely find a place right there next to Japanese robot dogs and motorized tie racks. Once in a while, these discs manage to successfully stretch out and enliven the original work (see: Massive Attack v Mad Professor's "No Protection"), but for the most part they're merely lazy stopgaps between proper albums -- the modern equivalent of the bloated double live records of the '70s. In the case of Canadian songbird Leslie Feist's "Open Season," it's a little bit of both. As a follow-up to her stunning 2004 major-label debut, "Let It Die," the release is a disappointment. It means not only another year without new material but also another run through the same old songs, with the single "Mushaboom" appearing in no less than four incarnations. As a worthwhile remix project, well, let's just say that at least three of those versions actually make the track sound worse. The rest of "Open Season" requires some serious hands-on mining, but it's not without its plunder: An acoustic version of "Inside and Out," recorded live for the BBC, brings the singer's languid voice to the forefront of the Bee Gees' disco classic; the Frisbee'd mix of "Lonely Lonely" sees the torch song get completely deconstructed and rebuilt around seductively skipped beats and a slide guitar solo; and a moody duet with Jane Birkin on "The Simple Story" should have rightfully made it onto the next real album -- whenever it comes out.