Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 22/06/09
Label: Sire Records

Regina Spektor's is a dicey art. The 29-year-old Russian émigré has walked a tightrope between precious and precocious since day dot, catching the ear of Sire Records in 2004 with third album "Soviet Kitsch"'s exuberantly off-kilter pop. She followed it up two years later with "Begin To Hope", a more polished record that went gold in the US and won plaudits from the critics, even if the weird subtext to all this acclaim did seem to run something along the lines of, "at least it isn't Norah Jones".

To understand Spektor's pedigree as a songwriter, however, we need to go back to her beginnings as a luminary on the New York anti-folk scene of the early 2000s, a motley assortment of self-effacing slacker-types blending punk and lo-fi aesthetics with folk idioms to irreverent effect. Spektor was frequently hailed as the pick of the bunch, drawing - and occasionally justifying - comparisons with 'legit' folk icons such as Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro.

But as thoughtful a record as it was for the most part, "Begin To Hope" shifted units off the back of pop blandishments as banal as "On The Radio" and "Fidelity", forging mental connections not with Joni and co but the legion kookstress songwriters that seem to have come simpering out of the woodwork ever since Kate Bush rose along with the world's collective eyebrow from a veil of mist in the "Wuthering Heights" video.

Now she's seen fit to hire not one but four big-name producers to twiddle knobs on "Far" - including Jeff Lynne and U2 whiz Jacknife Lee - and frankly it makes our blood run cold with images of Sunday supplement purgatory, Spektor trading soft-focus licks with Katie Meluah from out of suburban glove compartments for decades to come. Thankfully the reality is nowhere near as bad as that.

Granted, "The Calculation"'s tale of domestic ennui does little in the way of allaying fears; a slight and antiseptic opening gambit that revisits Lily Allen's reggae-pop with Spektor's trademark staccato piano phrasing. But for every moment of capricious humbug ("Folding Chair"'s cutesy declaration that "the sea is just a wetter version of the sky"; the trick bag of vocal mannerisms deployed on "Dance Anthem Of The '80s"), there are quiet victories ("Man Of A Thousand Faces") and soaring triumphs (the radiant "Human Of The Year") to be had.

There's also a lot of vaguely above-par material - "Eet"'s polite, Chris Martin-esque reverie springs most immediately to mind - which affirms that Spektor's high-wire act is still very much in the balance, but at the same time you can't help wondering: what does she do for an encore?

    by Alex Denney