Regina Spektor: Far

Singular artist diluted by too many cooks
The turn of the 21st century wasn’t exactly the best time to be a girl with a piano. After holding court throughout the 1990s, ivory queen Tori Amos had slipped off Scarlet’s Walk after Strange Little Girls, leaving Vanessa Carlton mewling in her wake and Fiona Apple floundering for another five years in label limbo. So the emergence of the Moscow-born, Bronx-raised Regina Spektor and her 2004 Sire Records debut, Soviet Kitsch, wasn’t so much a breath of fresh air as it was a much-needed swig of whatever potato-brewed goodness Spektor was chugging on her album cover. Classically trained but, equally, a student of bootlegged Western pop cassettes and noisy New York streets, Spektor plinked, plunked and crooned about ghosts and loogies, and she rapped about cancer and the strange sorrows of privilege with a beguiling panache, a completely new and delightful amalgam of her own design.
Her 2006 follow-up, Begin to Hope, hit like a hard glottal stop, bursting into the mainstream like the tempera-paint-powder fight in the video for lead single “Fidelity.” With this album came Spektor’s inevitable tagging as “quirky,” an irritating word that usually says more about the describer than the described. Here, though, it indicates an awareness of some sort of agreeable weirdness and lyrical depth—specifically, Spektor’s deeply assured sense of time, space and irony, which allows her to disregard everything sacrosanct and compress the past, present and future into transcendently ludicrous premises, stuffing modern brand-name snacks into the mouths of Biblical figures and parlaying a Guns N’ Roses reference into an acceptance of the certainty of death. Hope was decidedly less odd than its predecessor—lighter on the sprechrap, heavier on the string patches—but its offbeat charm was still intoxicating.
Spektor’s third Sire full-length would seem a prime opportunity for her to kidnap the fans she lured in three years ago with her weird sweetness and haul them off on some bizarre intergalactic journey, something stranger and more wonderful than anything she’d done before. By all accounts, she had it in her. But it’s unclear how much of Far is actually Spektor: No less than four producers—Mike Elizondo, David Kahne, Jeff Lynne and Garret “Jacknife” Lee—contributed to the album, and their collective efforts have resulted in a mid-tempo muddle of pseudo-lovely tracks plagued by a hovering cloud of meddling strings, slappy drums and perfunctory triangle chimes.