Tracks
Feist: "The Gatekeeper"
(2004/2005)
By Dom Sinacola | 9 January 2008
For my dad’s birthday at the beginning of the month, I bought him Let It Die. Not because I knew that somewhere he expressed some kind of enjoyment with Norah Jones and not because Norah Jones was the first sloppy thought that crossed my mind when “Gatekeeper” opened or, not, because on Amazon, Norah Jones proclaimed her love for Feist’s already-loved album. I guess I figured that out of anyone, my dad deserved to drive calmly and ineffably into a sunset.
Overwrought prose, sure. A sunset is obvious, but then, so is “Gatekeeper,” a song obviously bent on Feist’s voice (that voice I want to have children to, both in terms of copulation and actual birth). Her acoustic strum is more percussive than melodic, so restrained and quiet as to really not pose a difference between the two. A crisp tick of vibes (vibes?) graces the chorus, marking the beginning of every, say, four measures, sometimes missing the mark and then making up for it by jumping an octave when the chorus ends. Gurp—the sound I make pulling away from the computer screen after leaning too closely to hear the barely audible rims of the song coming out of the speakers that flank my monitor—did I just hear an oboe swarm under the last ten seconds? Maybe.
“Gatekeeper / Seasons wait for your nod / Gatekeeper / You held your breath/ Made the summer go on and on,” she licks her lips to moisten them, so “don’t be fooled” by anything more seductive. Would be too easy to fall in love with her here, call her voice angelic, imagine those’re your lips by what’s gotta be her ear. Instead, Feist laments the unpredictable force of change, resigns to even the seasons’ inability to operate naturally apart from, er, the Gatekeeper, the painful, spectral motor of change. All this in a sinuous skeleton of an arrangement, simultaneously wary and receptive. So, while I guess I figured that out of anyone, my dad deserved to drive calmly and ineffably into a sunset, I assumed that in this album’s first minutes, he’d find himself taking his hands off the wheel.
Overwrought prose, sure. A sunset is obvious, but then, so is “Gatekeeper,” a song obviously bent on Feist’s voice (that voice I want to have children to, both in terms of copulation and actual birth). Her acoustic strum is more percussive than melodic, so restrained and quiet as to really not pose a difference between the two. A crisp tick of vibes (vibes?) graces the chorus, marking the beginning of every, say, four measures, sometimes missing the mark and then making up for it by jumping an octave when the chorus ends. Gurp—the sound I make pulling away from the computer screen after leaning too closely to hear the barely audible rims of the song coming out of the speakers that flank my monitor—did I just hear an oboe swarm under the last ten seconds? Maybe.
“Gatekeeper / Seasons wait for your nod / Gatekeeper / You held your breath/ Made the summer go on and on,” she licks her lips to moisten them, so “don’t be fooled” by anything more seductive. Would be too easy to fall in love with her here, call her voice angelic, imagine those’re your lips by what’s gotta be her ear. Instead, Feist laments the unpredictable force of change, resigns to even the seasons’ inability to operate naturally apart from, er, the Gatekeeper, the painful, spectral motor of change. All this in a sinuous skeleton of an arrangement, simultaneously wary and receptive. So, while I guess I figured that out of anyone, my dad deserved to drive calmly and ineffably into a sunset, I assumed that in this album’s first minutes, he’d find himself taking his hands off the wheel.