Regina Spektors been off the radar for a couple of years now. There was the benefit gig at Lincoln Center but it was $250 a tix and I decided to pass her. Last time, I saw her was at Radio City and I was a bit whatever about the set.
My mistake.
Her first single since 2009 is a masterpiece. It is instantaneously the song to beat. A piano (surprise!!) based track with echoey drums and maybe a little bit overproduced. But it is a magnificently strange thing. It is like a found artifact. Regina is in a museum looking at oil paintings and she is imagining that the rowboats want to run away because stuck where they are the paintings are imprisoned.
Regina takes this strange image and runs with it to violins lying in coffins.
It is really beautiful and strange, the images are a haunting medley about the crushing conformity of art and an image of art and artist attempting to jump out of the structures of the world in which they are living.
Spektor is one of our greats and she, like the oil paintings she pities, seems to be getting strait jacketed by her success. Spektor feels like a object of approval: like a cultural object, a name to drop. A form of self-rightousness that doesn't fit in at all with her song. That shouldn't be associated with the woman who wrote "Ink Stains" -a devastating sneer at anti-semites or "All The Rowboats" -nowhere the contempt seems to be turning elsewhere, toward itself.
Grade: A