Album Review: Regina Spektor, Home, Before and After

Regina Spektor records tend to be introspective and rawly honest. Home, Before And After is no different, kickstarting with the rapturous lines, “I was walking home alone, past all the bars and corner delis/ When I heard God call out my name/ And he said ‘Hey, let’s grab a beer.’” 

Such religiosity, one that sees God in the banal, pours forth across the record. Indeed ‘Up The Mountain’ mingles the Tibetan Book of the Dead with the ‘Rattlin’ Bog’, while on ‘One Man’s Prayer’, the forlorn narrator calls out to God.

“Oh! An incurable humanist you are,” Spektor croons on ‘Loveology’, telling her paramour, “Let’s go to the movies, I will sing you a song about nothing at all.” The ominous sugar daddy of ‘SugarMan’ – “Sometimes you need some sugar to get through the years/ Just find a lap to sit on and you’ll get something to eat” – is sweetly disgraced.

Indeed, the cabaret whimsy permeating the record is constantly undercut with something darker. ‘Through A Door’, for example, veers from absolutely joyful to menacing. Similarly, the flighty nursey rhyme of ‘What Might’ve Been’ (“Sickness and flowers go together”) is peculiarly hollow. Perhaps ‘Spacetime Fairytales’ – capricious and kaleidoscopic – best encapsulates this idiosyncratic offering.

Listen: ‘Becoming All Alone’  

Out now via Warner.