Regina Spektor lives, I expect, in a forest with the Judderman, a bottle and a piano. Sometimes pegged as another Cornflake girl, who trades in idiosyncratic waifishness, her image unwittingly excludes people from what is more often than not a hospitable and inclusive sound. Cue producer David Kahne and a trip to the NY meatpacking district, resulting in Begin To Hope, which offers plenty of pop-friendly touches.
Those unused to Spektoral falsettos, complicated arrangements and sticky-sweet stories of humanity and wit would do well to step in and pick up the thread here. And those grumbling that a Faustian deal with a major label will result in a trade-off, with her piano-led mélange of disparate styles and vocal acrobatics inevitably becoming victim to more radio-friendly trillings and – heaven forbid – synthetic sounds, should just relax.
Occasionally, it's true – in ‘Fidelity’, for instance, or ‘Better’ – the Russian-born New Yorker evokes a pickled Vanessa Carlton. But from there on in, it’s Biblical stories, passion, overdoses, orca whales and staying up late drinking.
‘Hotel Song’ is a neat pairing of Spektor’s vocals with some shameless electronica, not the slightest bit out of place beside ‘Lady’, her tribute to Billie Holiday. Sung with a hint of that Billie twang that’s just subtle enough not to be insolent, lines like “I can sing this song so blue that you will cry in spite of you” are meaningful and melancholic without descending into the lachrymose.
Spektor relies mostly on songs of introspection, and vignettes of destructive relationships, and neatly does so (in Russian and French) in ‘Apres Moi’ (evoking Louis XV, who, having bankrupted 18th-century France with massive taxes on the poor while the nobility paid none, reputedly said “Après moi le deluge”/"After me come the floods”. The phrase has come to epitomise those who live in selfish, hubristic decadence at the expense of others with no thought for tomorrow).
As for that Russian verse, you’re on your own...