Regina Spektor
Far
(Sire, 2009)

Let’s get personal. A music fan I know is blowing my mind right now with screeching hatred for Regina Spektor. To wit, “I really just don’t get what’s to like about this. At its absolute best, it’s unobtrusively dull. But mostly it’s just so, so trite and precious and punchable.” Let’s upturn the glass and say, at absolute worst, Far is unobtrusive and dull. But except for the atheist-baiting single “Laughing With”, the whole affair is almost offensively inoffensive.

Unless you count “Stillness Is the Move” or Bat for Lashes (and please don’t), this is not a banner year for women in the music press. Lily Allen shored up an absolutely unusual amount of spew earlier in the year for an album that talked back to soft dicks (of both kinds), and in my circles, Far looks to earn the same. Granted, her “preciousness” is mostly due to her proximity to the so-called “anti-folk” scene wherein she spun her wheels until the Strokes bagged her for a tour, though neither she nor empath Kimya Dawson is as cutesy as she’s made out to be. On Spektor’s last album, she reminisced on freaking out the second time her boyfriend OD’d, dropping it suddenly and unsettlingly into what began as a nostalgic walk-about eating tangerines (“so cheap and juicy!”). She made Samson pissed that the Bible didn’t mention Delilah (“not even once!”) and resigned himself to a slice of Wonder bread. She turned her vocal intonation into an effective device for her kid song (“If I kiss you where it’s sore / Will you feel bettaw?”) and loved nobody fully. But let’s get one thing straight right now: If these predilections are anti-folk, then Jewel is Kimya Dawson.

Far is her most normal record by some distance—there’s no token punk track or a tune sung in Russian. Building a computer on the first track, surmising “why we fight” near the end, she’s almost too grounded for her own good this time. Whimsically, her controversial answer to Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” pushes buttons because it suggests God can be funny when he’s not putting us through war or hospitals. Spektor is always a poet of everyday life, with very few, if any, fantastical allusions in her goofily plain-spoken asides (“you silly clown”). She even calls “blue” the most human color, which I hope doesn’t now qualify Billy Joel as an anti-folkie. Musically, she pulls a weird trick of appearing both quieter and less catchy than last time (2006’s superb Begin to Hope) when, in fact, she’s just so sharply hooky by now that she’s passively automatic. And the arrangements are fuller, if less punchy, than the piano-with-beatbox accompaniment of Hope. The musically satisfying moments eventually win repeats: The casual Radiohead-like miniature “Machine”, the bouncy “Folding Car”, and the swinging cabaret-ish opener “The Calculation.” And while “Laughing With” appalled me, as an agnostic, in the album’s context, it falls well into place as both a song and a conversation worth having.

And that’s basically the step Spektor shoots for; being so extraordinary that she strives to invade your ordinary. But the only thing anti- about her is that she’s anti- this year being underrepresented for women, and Far makes short work of that. Definitely not punchable.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: Regina Spektor, Far, Sire Records

Read more articles like this:

Origin of Song: I Got My Radio On

Joan Baez: The Folk Heroine Mellows with Age

Album review: Jolie Holland, The Living and the Dead