Grade: A-
It has been more than four years since Regina Spektor’s last album “What We Saw from the Cheap Seats” hit the airwaves. For most artists, such a move could be almost career suicide, but Spektor has managed to overcome the commercial music norm.
About a year after the aforementioned record, Spektor recorded “You’ve Got Time,” the theme for the soon-to-be monumental Netflix original series “Orange is the New Black.” It’s a song that will have you go “Man, will this song ever end?” to singing every word and note of the upbeat tune “Wayne’s World”- style in just about five episodes.
More recently, she performed an exotic, and surprisingly faithful, cover of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for the soundtrack of the 2016 summer animated film “Kubo and the Two Strings.”
Now, after a devastatingly long wait, Spektor has finally given us the gift of her seventh LP, “Remember Us to Life.”
There’s no way to describe this record in a single adjective other than earthy. Like many 1960s folk-rock albums before it, you could almost imagine the record being recorded in a mountain somewhere with its great mystique.
The only real exception to this would be the song “Small Bill$,” which, while being a fantastic track, honestly sounds like Spektor emulating Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” as a sort of boss-girl anthem.
With that said, there is still a majestic quality to this record that makes it feel more prestigious, without borderlining pompous, than most indie rock releases. I haven’t heard anything quite like that since Rufus Wainwright’s “Out of the Game.”
At the same time, Spektor knows how to show her signature cheekiness in these tracks. “Grand Hotel” feels like some oddball tossed salad with Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel,” The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Homer’s “The Odyssey” as the main ingredients.
“Obsolete” is probably the most tragic of all the songs on this LP.
Spektor’s half-hearted piano-playing and lamenting vocals are tear-inducing at the very least, and by the time the song reaches its climax, it will be Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” all over again.
But it’s no competition, really, that the true standout on this record is “The Trapper and the Furrier.” The song begins with a truly gorgeous a capella performance by Spektor and transforms into full-body-shaking fury as she recounts this story of the oppression of the innocent and the celebration of the cruel.
The percussion on this track, in all its cataclysmic excellence, is probably the best I’ve heard since Lorde’s debut album. The lyrics also have this early ’60s Bob Dylan storytelling aspect to them that is tragically rare in most modern music.
However, the song arrangement on “Remember Us to Life” is not gifted with smooth and lovely transitions. “Obsolete” really should have been the final song on the album, but is instead followed by two other non-suiting tracks.
Regardless, there is a strong theatric quality to this record that makes for one of Spektor’s strongest releases since maybe “Soviet Kitsch.” It’s the closest you may ever get to Broadway without buying a ticket.
