:: Track Listing

1. Fidelity
2. Better
3. Samson
4. On The Radio
5. Field Below
6. Hotel Song
7. Apres Moi
8. 20 Years Of Snow
9. That Time
10. Edit
11. Lady
12. Summer In The City

:: Record Review

Regina Spektor

Begin to Hope
(Sire; 2006)

Rating: 66%
Combined Rating: 67%


The faithful were outraged. They'd been betrayed, hoodwinked and bamboozled. All of this emotional investment, to say nothing of free publicity, had been rewarded by what could only be defined as selling out. They brayed, they gnashed their teeth, they howled into the night. Dylan had gone electric, Metallica cut their hair, Liz Phair worked with the Matrix, and Regina Spektor worked with a producer.

Spektor made the mistake of essaying her new album's first two songs on her Myspace page. The umbrage was instantaneous and heavy; shouts of Judas were heard; the only thing missing was The Hawks. This prompted Spektor, somewhat coquettishly, to defend her work in a long post. She questioned why her fans would feel ownership of her work, and further was (rightly) offended by suggestions she'd allowed herself to be used. "Nobody changed me," she asserted; she'd made her album, she made the choices she wanted to make.

Her point is irrefutable; if the fan is going to point fingers at anyone, it ought to be Spektor. Placing the blame on producer David Kahne, however, is much more fun, because Begin to Hope is one of the most bewildered, confused and mish-mashed albums yet this year, and it's not because the material is lacking. Rather it's that her songs are crammed into the gaudiest saffron of adult-contemporary rock, and the signs all point to Kahne's expertise. His resume is highlighted by work with by late-period Paul McCartney and The Strokes' First Impressions of Earth, which, you may remember, also kinda sucked.

In his defense, though, Spektor has been effusive in her praise of the album's crystalline veneer, citing it as an modus operandi for Begin to Hope. "Before I even started on this record I knew I was going to experiment with things I've only thought about… I wanted to play with electronic instruments and bigger arrangements." To this reviewer, this translates as the artist purposely imitating many of her favorite records, which further translates into the artist having no idea what album she wanted to make and so tried to make as many as she could. This could explain the album's basic inconsistency in tone. It opens with the buoyant, synthesizer-driven "Fidelity," and from there varies wildly: the austere and brilliant "Samson" follows the frankly awful "Better," where whatshisfuck from The Strokes guests. It sounds targeted for the end-credits of an instantly forgotten summer teen movie. "On the Radio" is a retread of "Fidelity," and while "Hotel Song" boasts the album's strongest hook the lyric that accompanies it is "a little bag of cocaine/a little bag of cocaine/so who's the girl wearing my dress?"

The disc's second half fares better, given that Side 1's overtures to the pop market never deliver. "Apres Moi" is a tense, clipped waltz in a minor key that builds its instrumentality well, though personally I could've done without the tube bells. "That Time" is vaguely reminiscent of P.J. Harvey, though the compressed and EQ-d out drums prevent it from lifting up. Same with "Edit," which musically culls ideas from recent Radiohead but is much more calculated than that band.

Then there's the issue of the lyric sheet, which is as brilliant as Spektor's ever been. This comes through better in the more subdued, unadorned songs: "Samson" is a moving ode to the anonymity of love: "The stars came falling on our hats / but they're just old light / Your hair was long when we first met… the history books forgot about us / and the Bible didn't mention us / not even once." "Summer in the City," which closes the album, is breathtaking. A flipside to that Bright Eyes song about fucking while Baghdad burns on TV, here Spektor's character finds summer in New York so lonely ("summer in the city / means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage") she goes to a protest "just to rub up against strangers / and it made me feel like coming but it also made me feel like crying / and it doesn't seem so worth it now." (But when Connor Oberst writes a stanza with imagery as striking as "The castrated ones stand on the corner, smoking / they want to feel the bulges in their pants start to rise… her skin makes them sick in the night / nauseous nauseous nauseous," please let me know, because I promise I will quit reviewing music entirely.)

So we're slapping a middling rating on this thing, because the script is there but the cinematography put us to sleep. Damned shame, too, because nothing is worse than when the album's substance is obscured by the distracting presence of its production. A better fit for Spektor might have been Tony Doogan or John Vanderslice, who've done excellent work on The Mountain Goats last records without sacrificing any of John Darnielle's quirks and strengths. Begin to Hope is a (fucking cringe-worthy) title that implies good starts, but for her major label debut, Regina Spektor is off on the wrong foot. Christopher Alexander :: 18 June 2006 |