It's no secret that Regina Spektor has some quirks. As a songwriter and performer, she hoards eccentricities like the Collyer brothers (Google it). She hiccups and yawps, breaks syllables against their grain, beatboxes unself-consciously, belts like Ethel Merman, recites like Patti Smith, coos like Tori Amos, shrieks like a Kate Bush for the McSweeney’s set. And her songwriting, in addition to occasionally folding in snippets of “Hava Nagila”, makes frequent, often humorous use of pop culture references, anachronisms, dream imagery, even made-up words. And yet, these eccentricities allow unfriendly listeners to keep Spektor at a distance, dismissing her feminine presence as cutesily affected while indulging the endless costume changes of Gnarls Barkley and the sniping whine of Conor Oberst.
But eccentricity isn’t her defining characteristic. That would be her native intelligence, which shows through in every note. Spektor is a street-smart songwriter masquerading as a book-smart one, with a self-awareness that can be endearingly goofy. Spektor can profess her love for “November Rain” and paraphrase the Madame de Pompadour without stretching, showboating, or seeming academic.
This quality-- her smarts-- is present in every aspect of her new album, Begin to Hope, except perhaps in its made-for-TV-movie title. Her third full-length and first recorded under her major-label contract, the record was produced by Dave Kahne, who has turned knobs for the Bangles, Paul McCartney, and, um, Sugar Ray. Under his direction, Begin to Hope sounds expensive: There’s a hermetic studio quality to the tones, a studied three dimensionality in the interplay of instruments, and a perfectionism in the mix that suggests a bigger budget and a nicer studio. Elegant beats sculpted from orchestral samples adorn opener “Fidelity” and “On the Radio”, while precisely calibrated synths enter and exit on cue. “Hotel Song” trips along on a snappy drumbeat and a spritely chorus that has the professional bearing of Brill Building pop. On “Lady”, a paean to Billie Holiday, Spektor duets with a mournful jazz band that cuts in and out abruptly like a staticky transmission from the past.
One downside to this crisp production is the loss of place: 2001’s 11:11 and 2003’s Soviet Kitsch both sounded like they could have been recorded in some smoky Bronx bar or in a friend’s living room, but Begin to Hope evokes no particular setting or venue. Nevertheless, Spektor sounds confident and comfortable. Her songwriting remains as testy and idiosyncratic as ever-- as well as ambitious. With all the fanfare and bombast of a battle hymn, “Apres Moi” is a Spektorian epic about the weight of mortality and heritage. She sings from the perspective of a statue, perhaps the one she sung about in “Us”. She rewrites the Beatitudes to instill a little paranoia: “Be afraid of the lame, they’ll inherit your legs/ Be afraid of the old, they’ll inherit your soul”. Then there’s that Madame de Pompadour reference: “Apres moi le deluge/ After me comes the flood,” she sings defiantly, as if the Russians have just defeated her very own Franco-Austrian armies. Spektor sings a verse in Russian, then leads the song to an stirring finale featuring a small symphony led by a rickety drum set. The song would sound like a stunt if it didn’t make so much sense and have so much feeling behind it.
Occasionally, though, Spektor can overdo it. On “That Time”, she recounts a string of friendly reminiscences: “Remember that time I ate only tangerines for a month,” she asks some unnamed companion before intoning, “So cheap and JUI-cy!” At the end she turns the song on its head with the sudden memory, “Remember that time you OD’ed?” The change in tone is a little too obvious and complete, like a movie with a cheap twist ending. Still, Spektor is bold enough almost to sell the song, and on the whole her performance throughout Begin to Hope exhibits new levels of control and direction, reaching a point where the song and the singing are inseparable.
