Live Shots

Feist

Promises of love, sex, and fulfillment are heady ones indeed. Pregnant with imagination, they're often rendered flaccid by the pinprick of reality. Similarly, when you land a sold-out Feist show, you expect to feel it all, as it were. She's a deft performer, gracious and generous with her audience, engaging fans with banter and participatory gestures such as an audience sing-along cum Canadian census. And yet, there simply wasn't a palpable connection between the stage and the assembled masses. The set came carefully curated, with a discernible thematic arc: Act one traversed the terrain of youth and courtship via "When I Was a Young Girl" from 2004's Let It Die. Act two transitioned to romance and new love, featuring the nostalgic "The Circle Married the Line" off last year's acclaimed Metals and a more-aggro-than-dreamy "My Moon My Man" courtesy of The Reminder (2008). Act three finally culminated in big emotions and inevitable disappointment on "Undiscovered First," which serves as Metals' climax and might have been this show's emotional hook. Instead, Feist and her four supporting players squandered the opportunity to milk the moment by racing along to "The Bad in Each Other." Emotional payoff had been thwarted. Openers Timber Timbre, a Canadian folk-rock trio evocative of M. Ward, did little to help the cause with a set too subdued and sleepy to capture the audience's attention.