Feist

If ballads were to take the form of liquid then the alt-folk fluidity seen washing over Feist’s audience recently could have filled an entire ocean. The experience was so aquatic in its inclination that the mermaid queen herself, Leslie Feist, covered her protruding tail with a floating black dress and an oversized whale of a guitar.

A packed out, and largely female, Shepherd’s Bush Empire had readied itself for the delicate siren by setting all phones to silent. Cast adrift somewhere between Kate Bush, Cat Power and Joni Mitchell, her fragile voice could only be sustained through the attentive gaze of the many.

Standing alone and shoeless beneath a shimmering disco ball, she commenced the underwater dream sequence with a shy quartet of slow numbers. Every time she surfaced for air, she constructed the swirling currents of ‘Honey Honey’ by layering repetitive loops of echoing wails. Steadily, she became enamoured with her sigh-heaving admirers and gliding into the uptempo beat of ‘Mushaboom’ she had them calling back to her in unison (had she not, the solo cascades of tender vibrato would surely have drowned in a sea of their own sameness).

The arrival of the highly adept and multifaceted band was therefore a grateful addition of pace. Combining brass, drums and a brace of piano, their wave of jazz created movement in the stream and despite a brief foray into seemingly ill-calculated blues, the crowd’s awe never faltered. Indeed, it was following the badass tale of ‘When I Was A Young Girl’ that the Canadian received her most convincing appreciation.

The whooping, hollering and open-mouth gaping continued after popular favourites ‘I Feel It All’, ‘My Man My Moon’ and cool-enough-for-Apple’s-latest-ad-campaign ‘1234’ were released. The similarity of these tracks to one another, and all three’s pressence on her latest album, highlighted the onlookers’ fishbowl forgetfulness. Although they sound the same, they’re actually different – a blissful disregard of the album’s ironic title, The Reminder.

However, if the hungry sharks circling the show were still too unimpressed to bite, they didn’t escape the net of gimmicks that she threw out throughout her performance: cover versions of songs by Sarah Harmer and fellow Broken Social Scenester, Kevin Drew; a four-part harmony involving all four floors of the “insane” Empire building; and a piano-playing marriage proposer that completely upstaged poor Feist, hook, line and sinker.