"Someday you'll wake up and you'll feel a great pain/ And you'll miss every toy you ever owned." Detractors of Regina Spektor's particular brand of clown-nose gutpunch pop will be delighted to know that this is an actual lyric from her new album, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats. Coming toward the middle of the sparse piano ballad "Firewood", the line is a handy embodiment of all the criticisms commonly lobbed at the 32-year-old's music: It's mawkish! It's puerile! It sounds like Peter Pan with a Tori Amos complex! And if you think all that's missing is some kind of quirky vocal affect, just hold out for the exaggerated, cartoonish gasps a few songs later.
Living as we do in the dawning of the "Age of Adorkable," it's all too easy to dismiss Regina Spektor as an emblem of the kind of coy, indie-girl stereotype that "Portlandia"'s "Put a Bird on It" skit mocked or that prompts me to email Julie Klausner's manifesto "Don't Fear the Dowager" to everyone I know when I see someone over 30 wearing a romper. But let's not be too hasty in our dismissals of Regina Spektor. Because although her most recent album Far was cloying in the extreme and brought the most polarizing elements of her music to the fore, it doesn't change the fact that her earlier stuff showed a daring kind of verve.
Moscow-born, Bronx-raised Spektor's breakout album was 2003's Soviet Kitsch, which had a reeling, drunken-sailor lurch and a mouth to match. She blurted lines like "Marianne's a bitch!" and "You don't love your girlfriend!" with transgressive glee, and the tone of songs like "Ode to Divorce" and "Us" oscillated so wildly from sad to sweet that it was difficult to predict what was coming around the next bend, even sometimes when you'd heard the song before. Its follow-up, Begin to Hope, lodged knotty, bittersweet emotions beneath the floorboards of more conventional-sounding pop songs (even its big, feel-good hit "Fidelity" has a creeping and unmistakable strain of melancholy: "I hear in my mind all of these voices"). Not every one of Spektor's songs finds the appropriate balance between sentiment and grit (and, when they don't, they always have an excess of the former). But at its best, her music isn't quirk for quirk's sake: It feels like a person trying-- and occasionally succeeding-- in capturing something true about the rushing, motley rhythms of life. A song like "Us" is the roving camera work of someone trying to take it all in, and playing the footage back to us to show that there are rarely frames without the coexistence of flowers and garbage.
Neither as inert as the syrupy Far but still lacking the roller coaster-whiplash of Soviet Kitsch's tonal shifts, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats moves at the pace of a parade float. And though it's not a particularly thrilling ride, it's a speed that allows Spektor's roving eye to document plenty of observations: The bubblegum marching-band number "Don't Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas)" watches kids in the Bronx "sledding down snow-covered slopes," while the lead-off single "All the Rowboats" tries to personify the inanimate objects in a museum where the "masterpieces [are] serving maximum sentences." If Far felt like it was stuck in neverland, though, Cheap Seats feels like something of a progression for tackling fleeting youth as one of its main themes. On "Firewood", she wistfully muses on the passage of time: "You'll take the clock off of the wall, and wish that it was lying."
As ever, though, Spektor's music is at its most affecting when she cuts out the baubles and goes for the most direct approach. The true tearjerker on Cheap Seats is "How", a soulful, no-frills "Unchained Melody" nod that recalls Begin to Hope's stunner "Summer in the City". But for every "How" there's an excruciating "Ballad of a Politician", and for every line like "How"'s crushingly simple address to a former flame, "You're a guest here, now," there's a line that you feel like you have seen before embroidered on a throw pillow ("Love more to get more love").
Now six albums into her career, Spektor presents both her sentimentalism and her more childlike qualities with a certain defiance: You can't miss every toy you've ever owned if you refused to trash your favorites. (And like so many aging class clowns, she's not quite parted with the habit of interrupting serious moments with funny noises.) Though it rarely makes good on the promise of her earlier songs, Cheap Seats is polarizing, and by now most listeners will have already decided whether or not they can stomach Spektor's peculiar kind of vérité, glass-half-full optimism. "Today we're younger than we're ever going to be," she sings on the opening track. Which, I suppose, is one way of looking at life.
