How’s this for coincidence: right after I write about quirky twentysomething brunette singer-songwriters, Regina Spektor comes out of the woodwork with a new album cover/tracklist/single. Yup, that was all me. You’re welcome. The album’s called Far and drops June 23.
The career path of Regina Spektor, it’s interesting to note, aligns roughly with the rise of the Hollywood Indie Forced Quirky Aesthetic. Said aesthetic began its full-force assault right around the release of Garden State (and Spektor’s Soviet Kitsch) in 2004, and peaked from 2006 to 2007 (with the Oscar nominations for Little Miss Sunshine and Juno), right when Spektor’s Begin to Hope was at its most ubiquitous. And just as the hip-yet-sincere-but-not-really vibe of those movies has recently reached mind-numbing levels of commercial saturation, so too has Spektor’s music been overutilized to the point where if I hear one more ad or TV show or trailer soundtracked by “Fidelity” or “Us,” I’ll shoot the offending music supervisor straight through the hea-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahahahaaaart.
Regardless, I’m a fan. She’s got a lot more lyrical depth and musical merit than fellow NYC “anti-folk” quirk purveyor Kimya Dawson, and while her cutesy mannerisms can be a bit much, you can tell her heart’s in the right place. So it’s hard to find fault with Spektor’s commercial prominence–she’s a whole lot easier on the ears than The Fray–but it does kind of make it harder to take tracks like the new “Laughing With” seriously. For one thing, the opening line is “No one laughs at God in a hospital.” Grey’s Anatomy much? The rest of the lyrics just pound away at that same idea: people laugh at God until they find themselves in some kind of serious situation. Original! And the somber, straightforward accompaniment is a far cry from the flighty piano lines and raucous outbursts that sold me on Songs, 11:11 and Soviet Kitsch.
It’s looking like Far will continue the poppy trajectory that Begin to Hope started, maintaining just enough of Spektor’s quirk to be interesting but not overdoing it. I can only hope there’ll be a high like Begin deep cut “Apres Moi,” where the former Muscovite belts out a verse in Russian, or that line in “Poor Little Rich Boy” where she goes “You don’t love your girlfriend/and you know that you shouldbutshethinksthatshe’sfatbutsheisn’tbutyoudon’tloveheranyway,” and it totally shouldn’t work but it does.
