In Review: What We Saw from the Cheap Seats

What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, 2012

Gist
Spektor might have lost a little of her humor and quirk in her newest effort, but she gains depth, coming back with often paradoxical lyrics and a dark (and possibly personal) sound not usually heard from her previous efforts. Her piano work has also become noticeably more eloquent and classical.

Overview 
The album starts with the track Small Town Moon which basically sets the mood and expectations for this album. A little lilting and easygoing--quirky but without conscious effort or need to be. The album ends, also, with the equally easygoing guitar-backed track Jessica, which I think is about a song for someone in coma, to which Spektor sings "I can't write a song for you, I'm out of melodies." This made me think how applicable it is to this album as she seems to be running out of the same wild random fervor notably present in her previous works. Her melodies have gone from quirky to emotionally deep, the sort of tracks on her album that I don't enjoy at once. Tracks with the same emotional traction like Lady, Man of a Thousand Faces, Field Below resonate throughout much of the album, save for one to three tracks. I also noticed how much she has switched from storytelling to writing heartfelt songs about heartbreak, sickness, coma, and unrequited love. She has perhaps gone more personal this time and thought of writing songs that people would not only love to sing--and be thought of as weird--but also would be able to relate to.

Favorable Tracks
The opener Small Town Moon worked amid an easygoing demeanor. The backing piano and percussion are easy to listen to and the song itself gets away with a marking phrase, "how can I leave without hurting everyone that made me?"

The new version of Ne Me Quitte Pas from 2002's Songs retitled as Please Don't Leave Me has a classic Spektor flair that blends quirky storytelling with catchy melody. The new version cuts off a verse and adds other instruments to the mix, most notably a trumpet routine that makes everything livelier.

Firewood goes for the daring as it compares humanity to a piano, with sickness and death equated to a piano being cast as firewood. This, I say, is the most emotional and memorable songs from this album, probably producing the most quotes you can need in time of depression and losing hope. The pathos is deep and the melody is deep and Regina does not spoil it by her quirky vocal antics.

The easy-going Patron Saint is a hymn to loving someone undeserving, backed up by playful and curious piano chords. It lights up mid-chorus with a cheery melody that makes it one of my favorite tracks in this album.

How is perhaps as mainstream a ballad can get under Regina's hands. The purity of its lyrics felt like Regina took the song to heart.

All the Rowboats, with its dark brooding tone, sounds like Far's Machine, in which she compares museums to public mausoleums. And like Machine, Rowboats is the noisiest, busiest track in this album.

Initially quiet, Open surprises with a good piano routine at the chorus. The song would have been pretty empty without that precious piano routine in the middle--it sounds like a spring morning coming into being. The exaggerated vowels sort of ruin the song and make it sound scary, with those exaggerated Os coming after a quiet verse.

And speaking of quiet, the very short Jessica, summing itself up in 1 minute, 44 seconds, closes the album with Spektor saying "I am out of melodies," swapping Spektor's piano for a guitar. The song feels like a conversation between two children: Jessica, who is in coma, and is about to celebrate her birthday this February, and her sister who's prompting her to wake up and grow older.

The bonus track Call them Brothers, co-written by Dishel and appears on his album, is a breath of fresh air from mostly solo efforts that Spektor dished out most of her career. The song, which is a hymn to war, is beautiful as well as haunting.

Two other bonus tracks in Russian were included. Both are written by the bard Bulat Okudzhava. Both are beautifully rendered by Spektor, which again brings to the forefront her classical piano.

Unfavorable Tracks
I like the quirky Regina, which is mostly absent here. Her quirkiest novelty work, Oh Marcello, is a big mess and did not work for me, although it seemed like a big middle finger for the whole music industry (just like how Lady Gaga keeps on using fake accents, acting like a good soul, hoping not to be misinterpreted).

The Party sounds better than Open, and even livelier, but there's a silliness to it that didn't quite work for me. You can imagine it playing at a city parade, though, with floats and confetti, but Regina needs to work on her rhymes here as those make her silly songs funny.

And my least favorite from this effort, The Ballad of a Politician, goes a la Songs. It feels like the lovechild of 20 Years of Snow and Chemo Limo and it didn't quite cut it out for me, perhaps due to Spektor trying to make her voice sound big and that just makes this effort too weird.

Conclusion
I am not sure, but Spektor feels running out of ideas, or at least the quirky ones. Gone are the days when she'd write about drinking soap she played with on the sink, singing dolphin songs, or refuse chemotherapy for a limo ride. She opts, however, to write more relatable songs about people being like a party not good for her, or a guy who falls for the wrong girl against her advices, or the impossibility of moving on from a lost love.

The general shortness of the album (the only album without a single track surpassing 5 minutes), the loss of the frenetic piano play for a more disciplined classical piano, the fact that you almost always see nothing from the cheap seats, and the admission that she's "out of melodies" in Jessica seem to be telling that she's out of stuff to write about. That or maybe she got tired of writing about quirky things. My fear is of the former. Ne Me Quitte Pas, one of the two or three quirky songs in this album, came from her 2002 album, Songs, and nothing in the album sounds like it, or of her old quirky songwriting.

You can also notice her marked change in clothing and figure. Is it possible that her music label is promoting her as a pop artist, which, of course, she is not?

Not that all those are bad things at all, but where's the funny and fun Regina Spektor? The wild Regina. This perhaps may be her darkest, possibly most personal and disciplined body of work to date, and that makes this album beautiful and a stand out compared to her previous works. It's impossible to hate what she makes, for me at least, but I can't help but miss the classic (ack) Regina who's just about quirkier and sillier, and would rather write about people inside a musicbox, two birds lying to each other, and being kicked out by the bartender. Where art thou, old Regina? Have the Skrulls taken over you, too?

Score: 4 out of 5 stars