Regina Spektor - Begin To Hope (2012)

Third album from the intelligent, eccentric singer-songwriter is her first recorded under major-label contract. It's no secret that Regina Spektor has some quirks. As a songwriter and performer, she hoards eccentricities like the Collyer brothers (Google it). She hiccups and yawps, breaks syllables against their grain, beatboxes unself-consciously, belts like Ethel Merman, recites like Patti Smith, coos like Tori Amos, shrieks like a Kate Bush for the McSweeney’s set. And her songwriting, in addition to occasionally folding in snippets of “Hava Nagila”, makes frequent, often humorous use of pop culture references, anachronisms, dream imagery, even made-up words. And yet, these eccentricities allow unfriendly listeners to keep Spektor at a distance, dismissing her feminine presence as cutesily affected while indulging the endless costume changes of Gnarls Barkley and the sniping whine of Conor Oberst.

But eccentricity isn’t her defining characteristic. That would be her native intelligence, which shows through in every note. Spektor is a street-smart songwriter masquerading as a book-smart one, with a self-awareness that can be endearingly goofy. Spektor can profess her love for “November Rain” and paraphrase the Madame de Pompadour without stretching, showboating, or seeming academic.

This quality-- her smarts-- is present in every aspect of her new album, Begin to Hope, except perhaps in its made-for-TV-movie title. Her third full-length and first recorded under her major-label contract, the record was produced by Dave Kahne, who has turned knobs for the Bangles, Paul McCartney, and, um, Sugar Ray. Under his direction, Begin to Hope sounds expensive: There’s a hermetic studio quality to the tones, a studied three dimensionality in the interplay of instruments, and a perfectionism in the mix that suggests a bigger budget and a nicer studio. Elegant beats sculpted from orchestral samples adorn opener “Fidelity” and “On the Radio”, while precisely calibrated synths enter and exit on cue. “Hotel Song” trips along on a snappy drumbeat and a spritely chorus that has the professional bearing of Brill Building pop. On “Lady”, a paean to Billie Holiday, Spektor duets with a mournful jazz band that cuts in and out abruptly like a staticky transmission from the past.