by LORRAINE CARPENTER

How many people can claim allegiance to the world's brightest synth-punk star, a beloved indie rock collective and the French pop charts? She won't brag about it, but ambidextrous singer-songwriter Leslie Feist fits the bill.

Before joining By Divine Right, Royal City and Broken Social Scene, and long before her solo career took flight with 1999's Monarch, Feist was a prairie punk. She cut her teeth (and lost her voice) over five years with Placebo, a band from her native Calgary. Somewhere amidst the rock, Feist (aka Bitch Lap-Lap) found time to do the nasty with Peaches and Chilly Gonzales on record and on stage, and it was her partnership with Gonzales that lit the fuse on her lovely new LP, Let It Die.

"Gonzo and I were touring steadily for about two years," says Feist, "and we spent all those hours in airports talking about, ‘If we made our own album, what would it be?'"

Loosely employing the Brill Building method of the early '60s, Feist and Gonzales began dividing duties and making rules. Crucially, they avoided using what Feist calls their "same old paintbrushes," meaning the tools and techniques of indie rock and electro.

"Instead, we went back to the things that were most familiar to us when we were 14, when I was singing in choirs and he was practicing piano for seven hours a day," she says, adding that Gonzo sought refuge from "the face" of his larger-than-life persona. "Whereas I had been juggling with both feet and both hands and dropping the ball quite a bit, so I wanted to concentrate on the face, the voice."

Manu Chao producer Renaud Letang eventually brought the duo to Paris, where Feist now lives, and where, together, they moulded her songs (and Ron Sexsmith and Bee Gees covers) into things of smoky bohemian beauty, with silken, sultry vocals casting casual glamour over minimal arrangements of horns and handclaps, piano and guitar. The album's lead single, "Mushaboom," has already been embraced in France, and Feist hopes her latest face will play just as well back home in hoser country.

With Ambulance at Cabaret on Thursday, June 10, 9pm, $12.50

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