She’s beautiful. She sings, dances, and plays the guitar, the piano, and the banjo. Leslie Feist’s talents are far and many, and one thing’s for sure, you’ll fall in love with her.

Born in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia but raised in Calgary, this feisty 31-year-old singer-songwriter is one busy woman. Apart from being a soloist under the name Feist, she’s a member of indie supergroup Broken Social Scene, who can be heard on the soundtracks of shows like Nip/Tuck and the movie Half Nelson.

She has also performed with electro punk singer and former roommate Peaches, and has collaborations with Norwegian folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience and Canadian indie rock group Apostle of Hustle, among many others.

The success of her second album Let It Die, with hits such as “Mushaboom” and a cover of the 1979 Bee Gees hit “Inside and Out”, won her 2 Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys) for Best New Artist of the Year and Best Alternative Album of the Year in 2005. And it also made the world sit up and embrace this “musically schizophrenic” singer-songwriter, as she says in San Francisco lifestyle magazine SF Weekly.

Listening to her latest album The Reminder can be likened to listening to her heart sing. It’s sad yet happy, and somewhat unpredictable. Once again, she collaborates with fellow Canadian musician Gonzales, who worked with her in her previous album.

Next to Let It Die, which can be comfortably classified as “a combination of jazz, bossa nova and indie rock”, as said in Wikipedia, The Reminder is a more ambitious project.

The music can be labelled experimental, folk-pop, and alternative, all of which fail to describe her unique genre adequately.

All 13 songs in The Reminder are her stories of love and heartbreak, which will draw you to remember your own forgotten memories of past romances. It’s not just an album that’s about her. As you listen more you will find that it’s an album that’s speaking about you.

The album starts off with the beautiful “So Sorry”, which makes you drop your guard and let Feist creep into your heart.

Like a glass of wine with plenty of body and flavour, the album should be savoured slowly to fully appreciate a depth of emotions that leaves you floored.

The arrangement of the songs in the album is erratic yet strangely well crafted. It’s rather unnerving (and a little shock to your ears if you’re using headphones) to hear the gentle relaxing swaying evoked by “The Water” suddenly interrupted by loud cheers and claps which herald the more upbeat “Sea Lion Woman”.

Feist gives you the feeling that she has poured her experiences and feelings into the album without holding anything back. She said as much in an interview with music magazine Filter that, “This record wasn’t conscious. That’s just always been the way I [have] looked at life and music. It’s kind of a photocopy of reality.”

Occasionally, you may hear dogs barking, footsteps and doors closing in between her songs. These simple sounds make her songs seem more human, next to the over-produced, ultra slick pieces we’re bombarded with.

But it’s really her haunting, silky voice that stirs your heart as she coos and purrs, making you want to steal her away.

With “I Feel It All” and “My Moon, My Man”, you’ll find yourself dancing unconsciously without a care in the world. The lively strums of the banjo in “1234” however, is mismatched with lyrics such as “money can’t buy you love you had back then”.

The piano ballad “How My Heart Behaves”, in which she sings with Kings of Convenience’s Eirik Glambek Boe, is a heartbreaking close to the album. As the piano tinkles and she croons: “The cold heart will burst, if mistrusted first”, you just feel like you’ve fallen in love all over again. Now that’s a reminder that’s always worth having.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars