Regina Spektor
What We Saw From The Cheap Seats
Reviewed on 30 May 2012
Rated 8 out of 10
Key Track: Key Track: Firewood
Listen to music now on MOG
Regina Spektor’s sixth studio album, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, is all over the place. There’s no direction, no purpose, no discernible theme; and yet it’s one of her best yet.
It’s like she just scooped out all the cream that floated to the top of her brain – the dizzy adoration, little wormy doubts, dramatic vignettes, flashes of New York, sorry feelings for violins behind glass.
There’s streaks of playful theatrics throughout, such as ‘Oh Marcello,’ which fluctuates from slowed soulful piano to crying in an over-the-top Italian accent; as well as ‘The Party’, in which she declares ‘you taste like birthday/you look like New Year’ while backed by marching drums.
There are moments when the melodrama is stripped of smiles, like in ‘Open’, with Spektor taking us by surprise with a sudden guttural gasp punctuating each line.
One of the stand-out tracks is almost missable, if you’re not really listening. The slow piano waltz, ‘Firewood,’ showcases Spektor’s best lyric-writing on the album. Each couplet is brimming with earnestness, ‘you’ll take the clock off of your wall/and you’ll wish that it was lying’. Hints of bigger storytelling in concise phrases, like the repeated line ‘the piano is not firewood yet.’
What We Saw from the Cheap Seats is a twisting, unpredictable ramble through the crevices of Spektor’s mind. Another hodgepodge of everything that enters her brain, gets chewed around a bit, and rearranged in true Spektor-ian style. A real step up.
- Tacey Rychter
Recent Record Reviews
Good Oak
Good Oak
Released through HAAF Records, 2013
It’s not for everyone, but if there was ever going to be a release that could swing more listeners towards folk music, Good Oak’s self-titled EP...
1 week ago
Haverford
Wisdom Lost
Released through Independent, 2013
Not many bands would choose to describe themselves as ‘emo’ especially with a sound like Haverford’s. Whilst the lyrics have hints of the evocative genre the syntax...
1 day ago
Miss Elm
Idle Away
Released through Footstomp, 2013
Miss Elm’s sophomore EP release Idle Away is a fresh taste of their signature addictive pop. With a mix of quirk, jazz, and all things in...
1 week ago
twenty | one | pilots
Vessel
Released through Warner Music, 2013
Ohio duo, twenty | one | pilots, are not easily defined. The sound of their debut album Vessel shifts between indie-rock, punk and hip-hop. It may...
6 days ago
Ghostpoet
Some Say I So I Say Light
Released through Play It Again Sam, 2013
British producer Obaro Ejimiwe, a.k.a. Ghostpoet made waves with his debut, Mercury-prize-nominated album, Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam in 2011. Back with number two, Ghostpoet...
1 day ago
