REGINA SPEKTOR

SINGULAR SONGSTRESS
Regina Spektor splits the difference between avant-folk and pop pleasures

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: June 01, 2012  http://www2.the-burg.com

Regina Spektor, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats (Sire)

Regina Spektor's new What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, her sixth full-length in a dozen years, begins straightforwardly enough. Accompanying herself quietly on piano, she wistfully reflects, "I must have left a thousand times/But everyday begins the same/Cuz there's a small town in my mind/How can I leave without hurting everyone that made me," singing in a soft, plainspoken voice that suits the seemingly plaintive tone of "Small Town Moon." A spare drumbeat arrives on the second verse and the narrative takes a slight turn for the strange, with Spektor stringing together apparent non sequiturs ("Oh baby it's all about the moon/I wish you wouldn't have broke my camera/Cuz we're gonna get real old real soon/Today we're younger than we're ever gonna be") in a carefree manner that's reflected in the offhand way she slides freely toward notes that put her perilously close to a region that lies just beyond her vocal range. And, then, after a short pause, serrated guitars and a heavy backbeat tear into the serenity, and Spektor, in full rock mode, bangs away at the piano, crooning "Stop, stop, what's the hurry?/Come on baby don't you worry, worry/Everybody not so nice, nice. . ."
    For one track, at least, Cheap Seats has a fairly familiar feel. Indeed, "Small Town Moon" isn't all that different from something you might hear from a sultry, soul-bearing, piano-playing songstress like, say, Tori Amos. But Spektor is categorically and unabashedly different. A Soviet emigre whose family moved to the Bronx when she was nine, Spektor studied classical piano and composition up through a four-year program at Purchase College's Conservatory of Music before finding a temporary home in NYC among what became known as the "anti-folk" scene — essentially, a loose coterie of singer-songwriters who didn't quite fit the trad folk mold, weren't really rock enough for the established club scene, and, among others, included artists as diverse as Beck and Michelle Shocked among its more notable members/supporters.
    Spektor, who self-released her debut album, 11.11, in 2001, didn't exactly abandon her classical training. Instead, she began to incorporate an eclectic array of genres into her songwriting, freely mixing and matching elements of folk, lo-fi indie-rock, jazz, blues, hip-hop, and what might best be described as just plain avant-garde. (The titles "Rejazz" and "$2.99 Blues" from that first album offer some sense of where she was headed artistically.) So. while she's perfectly capable of pulling off an accessibly skewed pop tune like the bittersweet "Small Town Moon," she is a much more idiosyncratic creature than even someone as mercurial, at times, as Tori Amos – a puckish pixie with a penchant for dropping guttural growls, fluttering trills, and other oddly affecting flights of vocal fancy into stylized songs that lean toward the theatrical.
    On Cheap Seats she dials back some of her more eccentric tendencies and splits the difference between anti-folk subterfuge and pop pleasures. "Oh Marcello" is a playfully perverse mash-up of sorts that alternates between Spektor delivering, in broken English and a faux Italian accent, lines about a bad-news dude, and dropping the accent to cop the central hook from the Animals' hit "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" ("I'm just a soul whose intentions are good/Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood"). And "Don't Leave Me (Ne me quitte pass)" is a Caribbean-style reworking of a tune she's been performing live for years, a bouncy tale of life in various NYC's Burgs now outfitted with a brassy horn section for a little extra punch. On some level, both songs are essentially genre exercises. But they're also somehow essential reminders of who Spektor is as an artist.
    Elsewhere, with the simple titled "How," Spektor irons out most of the kinks in her vocals and offers a straight-up smokey blues-inflected piano ballad about romance gone wrong — a torch song of sorts that one could easily imagine Adele digging into with her deeper, throatier voice. And, after a noisy electronic drum salvo, "All the Rowboats" morphs into a cleverly quirky rumination on the life of paintings locked in galleries and museums ("Masterpieces serving maximum sentences/It's their own fault, for being timeless/There's a price to pay, and a consequence"), while the dynamic, full-throated "Ballad of a Politician" has a little timely fun with the current state of our government without resorting to preachy dogma.
    The production on Cheap Seats emphasizes Spektor's voice over all else, creating a sense of intimacy that imparts a certain rawness to even the disc's most refined tracks. So, it would be a stretch to say it's a polished album by modern standards. But it's definitely Spektor's most accessibly composed disc to date. And, that's saying a lot for an artist who seems to revel in being an acquired taste.