Monday, December 19, 2016

album review: 'remember us to life' by regina spektor

So here's the unfortunate truth of being a critic and a human being: like it or not, sometimes it's not just the art that overrules your critical faculties, but circumstances and memories that are linked to that art. It might not just be the sound or a particular turn of phrase that sparks an emotion, it's the memories and people associated with that sound or lyric that renders fragile objectivity all the more precarious.

Case in point, about four years ago I was dating a girl who was very fond of Regina Spektor and encouraged me to check out her album What We Saw From The Cheap Seats. And while I had something of a mixed opinion on that record as a whole, when she and I broke up later that year it became a bit difficult to go back to Regina Spektor without pulling up old memories - not all bad or good memories, mind you, but fragments that place her music in an awkward context. And it's not helped by my frustrating relationship with Spektor's peculiar brand of anti-folk itself: earnest, frequently clever with some striking melodies, but brimming at the edges with an off-kilter quirk that added personality but could occasionally undercut the dramatic tension some otherwise potent songs. I've said it in the past that I've got a very limited tolerance for 'twee', and while it didn't compromise her early 2000s work up to 2004's Soviet Kitsch, after that it got dicier. And what's frustrating is that it didn't happen all at once or consistently. Begin To Hope actually had some emotionally poignant moments - especially the closer track - but Far started to push it for me, especially if you started getting into the lyrics. And that awkward dichotomy between heartfelt power and utterly garish quirk manifested most on What We Saw From The Cheap Seats - on the one hand you get powerhouse tracks like 'All The Rowboats', but on the other hand... well, let's just say besides that song I haven't had much of an impulse to go back to it.

But hey, maybe this new record - which was supposedly bigger and a little darker, it might hit a more satisfying point for me, and I've always thought Regina Spektor is an interesting songwriter, if not always a good one - she's got a penchant for random noises that drives me off the way - but whatever, how is Remember Us To Life?

Honestly, for as much as many critics described this as a return to form for Regina Spektor, I was skeptical going in... but yeah, they're right in this case, because this is easily the most serious and grounded that she's been in years. There's still idiosyncratic elements, but a lot fewer of them got on my nerves this time around, and this record seems tempered with the darker edge that feels fully unsheathed for the first time in years, not just lyrically but in the instrumentation as well. In other words, it looks like Regina Spektor honed in on the elements that I liked about What We Saw From The Cheap Seats and refined them into her strongest set of songs in years - in other words, a pretty damn good album. 

Now before we get to the songwriting and themes, where I'll probably have the most to unpack, let's talk about Regina Spektor herself. And look, as much as I've found her quirkier side tiresome in the past, it's because it has seemed to detract from the fact that she's a great singer and performer when she does embrace more sincere, straightforward songs. Naturally expressive and thoughtful, she's always been clever but here it feels channeled through a more mature mode of delivery, minus some of the wonky vocal improvisations that some love but has always been a quirk that felt vestigial at best. Again, your mileage may vary with this, but I suspect she dropped some of this so she could further emphasize how serious some of her subject matter is. But that's also very true with her instrumentation, as the tones have gotten significantly darker and colder. And no, not just because she's brought her considerable ear for melody to bear on synthesizers that have the sort of richer thick tones that manage to fit within the mix like on 'Small Bill$', but also because she opted for a much fuller backing orchestra behind her, full of rich cellos and upright bass to accentuate a more elegant sort of opulence. Hell, even the piano melody, which remains the foundation of these songs will occasionally feel the touch of atmospheric effects like on the swirling layers of 'Tornadoland' or the misty distance of 'Obsolete' - and yet to her credit Regina Spektor never allows herself to be swallowed by the mix, and also isn't afraid to pull back the mutlitracking and swell to something more intimate or mundane. The simple but jaunty foundational melody of 'Older And Taller' is a fine example and is strikingly reminiscent of Begin To Hope, but what caught my ear more was the gentle twinkle enticing the adventure of 'Grand Hotel', or the muted soothing tones around the main piano melody of 'The Light', or the tasteful intimacy of 'The Visit'. Hell, while I might not be wild about the thin gurgle of the tapping beat on 'Bleeding Heart' that breaks into borderline chiptune and a bridge that tries to go for blaring tones, the outro of the song is flat out gorgeous. And that's not even touching the darkest tracks here like 'The Trapper And The Furrier' with its ominous grind of strings or 'Sellers Of Flowers' that plays in similar minor tones and even cadences to 'All Of The Rowboats' and use the strings to crank up the ominous bombast.

But for as much as I like the sound, the big test for me with Regina Spektor is the songwriting, so what is she aiming to get at with Remember Us To Live? Well, remember how I referenced 'All The Rowboats' - one of the underlying sources of tension in that song was stasis - it had the feel and tone of wandering through a museum, frozen in a moment, the violins in glass coffins unable to find life. It was taking all those things outside of the flow of time... and yet for as much tension as Spektor drew from artificially freezing it, she draws plenty more from living within it, knowledgeable and in wonder of its past like you see in the step-by-step journey down the well on 'Grand Hotel' trying to recapture an old fashioned misadventure, all to the very real fears for the future that come up in the on-the-nose but effective social commentary of 'The Trapper And The Furrier', showing a system that will continue to feed those at the top without question while leaving those beneath them poor, sick, and unable to seek recourse. It makes trying to isolate those moments and pass things alone all the more difficult, especially if there is any desire to see legacy preserved, from her wish to pass along stories and dreams to her newborn son even as old visions of the past slip away on 'The Light', to the musings of youth misspent on 'Older And Taller', as figures of her youth are confronted and seem both more and less than what she remembered. 

Now a record like this could very easily slip into wistful nostalgia, but Spektor is a fair bit smarter, half because she's all too aware of what could come ahead - 'Small Bill$' is a stark example, as in the presence of casual misspent wealth those on the desperate edge of poverty have a tendency to rise in revolt - but half because she's not afraid to confront the fact that time is going to move on regardless, which is cemented in the final three songs which are easily some of her best. 'Obsolete' shows her in the position of one paralyzed at the edge, increasingly aware of irrelevance but unable to truly respond, but 'Sellers Of Flowers' is canny enough to not really have an easy answer for blame, not those who would repackage art to sell or those who buy it to forget, or those who never buy and never care but maybe just the steady stretch of time, which never seems to flow at the speed you'd like it. And that's frustration lingers all across this record, from wishing a friend would be able to reach out and heal from internal pain and depression faster on 'Bleeding Heart' or the impatience of 'Black And White' to claim and process the pain... all the way to 'The Visit', to a meeting with an old friend who always seemed a step out of time and a subtle acknowledgement that really that sense of time is a construct that we've built as a construct for our fears. And yet there's the subtle trick of it all: we only fear time because we can't control it, and anchoring our fears to its flow obscures the beauty of connections that truly never change, the old friends that never quite seem to change, the moments that are... well, timeless.

You know, it's funny how I opened this review talking about an old relationship and how it has tended to color how I view Regina Spektor records... but the truth is that time has pushed the story forward, and with no ill will left there, I'm left wondering what she's say if she saw this. Because once you get to a certain age, you don't tend to change all that much... maybe that's time's trick, for those who stride in step with it, but keep their own path. In short, the more I've thought about and written about Regina Spektor's Remember Us To Life, the more I've come to really appreciate it for its subtlety, beauty, atmosphere, and real sense of maturity and wisdom. As such, I'm confident giving this an 8/10 and a very strong recommendation - Regina Spektor is a damn great storyteller, and you can trust me when I say that folks will remember this one.

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