Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 10/07/06
Label: Sire

Like a female, Russian-American Timmy Mallett, much of Regina Spektor's energy is spent trying to prove she is the wackiest person you've ever met. "I have dreams of orca whales and owls," she sings, vast brown eyes imploring you to slap her on the arm and call her cuckoo. "Remember that month when I only ate boxes of tangerines? / So cheap and juicy! / Tan-ger-ines! /" she continues and, just in case you're not agog yet: "I went to a protest just to rub up against strangers".

Contrived or otherwise, this combination of little girl, sex vixen and drama queen has seen her fast-tracked through the system from cult act to a major label priority. Born in Russia and raised in the Bronx from the age of nine, she practised the piano in her local synagogue before studying classical music and, in 2001, launching herself on the nascent New York City anti-folk scene, playing gigs in coffee shops to the battered-Converse and ironic badges crowd.

After self-releasing two albums, the support of NY hipsters such as The Moldy Peaches and The Strokes (whose Nick Valensi plays guitar on "Better") helped a third outing ("Soviet Kitsch") catch the eye of Warner Music. Earlier this year, they released "Mary Ann Meets The Gravediggers" - a back catalogue compilation that served as introduction for audiences on this side of the Atlantic to a beatnik shtick that has variously been compared to Bjork, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.

Rather than continuing on an upward trajectory of nuttiness, however, Spektor seems to have refined / homogenised her sound somewhat with "Begin To Hope". It's an easier listen than its wildly imaginative predecessor - opening with knee-huggingly sappy love ballad "Fidelity" which might be Madeleine Peyroux. The poppy "Hotel Song" goes so far as to ditch her trademark piano for cheap electronic handclaps, but thankfully (she is a superb pianist) it's wheeled-out again for spectacularly doomy piano number "Après Moi" which offers bursts of Rachmaninov-esque key-bashing, glockenspiel, snippets of French and lots of impassioned declaiming in Russian.

All singers use their voices as instruments but only Spektor must actually need to wipe hers down with a swab after each song. In addition to soulful jazz chanteuse tones, she is also known to sneeze and spit, grunt, scat and rap, and regularly emits noises that sound like wood scrapers, drums and pan pipes. Here she is mistress of the chopped-up, glottal vowel sound. Songs are heard "On the radio-ugh-oh!" Music breaks her "h-ugh-ugh-ugh-ugh-eart!". It's brave, it's playful, it's a Juilliard vocal workshop and it can be ugly - but, like every other Spektral sound, it's never less than hugely impressive.

If you can stand all the tics, "Begin To Hope" is an insanely f-agh-agh-antastic album.

    by Anna Britten