Match each muppet’s expression to its counterpart blurb…
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[5.57]
Thomas Inskeep: This no-fi single is clearly going for early PJ Harvey (especially when it, too late, gets going near the end), but it never makes it. Nothing to see here.
[2]
Alfred Soto: Of course it sounds like Polly Jean Harvey; even the whistling keyboard and the whisper-to-a-scream dynamics of the guitar work suggest someone holds Uh Huh Her close. Tom Waits too. After a while the striving for effect makes for an attenuated performance. But in that it’s not charmless.
[6]
Crystal Leww: So much of Feist’s music sounds the same, but when that formula works and still feels good and works with her voice, why ruin a great thing?
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: Feist is a singer to whom whimsy comes easy, but “Pleasure” is not a fey song. Its ghostly verses, moonlit by brambles of melody, find themselves taken by ugly burls of lurching alt-rock guitar. Feist summons from her oft doily-like voice a low assertiveness to match its ashy blackness, both the riffs and the snarl are reminiscent of PJ Harvey at her most doom-laden. (Think the driving determinism of “The Words That Maketh Murder” if stripped to the skeletal Dry.) The song’s subject is in its title — “it’s my pleasure and your pleasure,” she sings — but it’s the blurred edges, the sense that the darkness contains marvellous and dreadful things, is what makes it so absorbing.
[8]
Micha Cavaseno: Its raggedy in a way that really stands in opposition to the inviting lullaby mewls of her breakthrough on The Reminder. If there’s anything I’d directly connect it to, its not the easy citation of PJ Harvey but rather the disjoint of Sketches for my Sweetheart-era Jeff Buckley. This is a flavor that’s fallen out of favor with me long ago, but listening to Feist go to work with it, she certainly has on issues working beyond simplicity, sounding as restless in this song as desire ends up always being. Sad that it doesn’t satiate this listener.
[4]
Tim de Reuse: The design of this song is fantastic in itself; it’s all finger noises and palm-muted plucks in the beginning so that the shy, hovering strings in the middle sound momentous, and so that the finale punches twice as hard as it ought to considering there’s not technically that much going on. The concept of “pleasure” is enthusiastically invoked in a sticky, nervous way — a “mysterious thing” that you “make sense” of — and the full picture of it that the song proposes is vivid and honest and maybe a little frightening. It’s an immediately compelling and worthwhile take on subject matter that is usually resigned to unambiguous feel-good gloss.
[8]
David Sheffieck: There’s plenty to like here: how the verses sound like they’re sung through a tin can, how abruptly it goes off the rails into distortion and abrasiveness with little warning, how the outro shifts almost into another idiom entirely. But those wild shifts mean nothing really coheres, just sparks a moment of interest before fading just as soon. I imagine in the context of an album that would be fine, but on its own this is more interesting than relistenable.
[5]