It's not that the slower songs aren't good, but when more than half the album consists of a girl and her piano - plus some funky extra (but minimal) sounds and a lot of water/mountain metaphors (I'll let you figure that out) - they tend to blur together. Feist seems to get lost in her music, as if in a trance, where her vocals echo and wrap around themselves to create more of an ambiance than a narrative. But when she picks up the pace, as in the haunting, jazzy "My Moon My Man" or the tribal "Sealion," her interpretation of Nina Simone's "See Line Woman," she creates an urgent sexiness without losing any of the mood or insight.

Because the Canadian singer-songwriter is riding a shallow but growing wave of buzz into the U.S., I was hoping her sophomore effort would showcase her range of musical interests and to some extent, it does. The instrumentation is creative, unpredictable and sometimes curious, but in a good way. She's a worldly pop chanteuse that just happens to sometimes play the banjo. (I might not know punk, but that seems pretty punk, right? Right?)

After touring for two and a half years supporting her first album, Let It Die, Feist cozied up with her band in a 200-year-old French manor house to record The Reminder. It's intimate, it's torchy, and even though she seems to have been dragged down by all the self-reflection, the overall album is beautiful. So after all that deep, profound self-analysis, let's just say the cover art for The Reminder is cool, and leave it at that.