Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Regina Spektor needn’t have that piano in front of her. I repeat, she doesn’t need any help. It’s a superfluous prop that serves as an apostrophe-shaped, wooden box on stage and as room decoration everywhere else. It emits what her fingers want it to, but it’s a gratuity. What we’re here for is the beautiful New Yorker’s effervescent voice, which comes across as stained glass windows do in a bright sun storm and as a diamond refracted. It’s spell-binding and orgasmic. How she makes it sound like that and still get it to carry on like the purity of the trade winds is beyond intelligence.

“Begin To Hope,” Spektor’s second album and major label debut, is another momentous piece of pulsating confection that flutters, drips like candlestick wax, shocks, goes on adventurous lyrical benders and knocks you flat on your ass. She’s America’s best-kept secret, hands-down. She creates a world all her own with nearly every song on the disc, which is the true pursuit of anyone who sets out as a writer or artist. Her music is akin to a bearskin rug—abnormal, warm, soft to the touch and unable to ignore. Forget the elephant, it’s the bearskin rug in the room that’s the Regina-approved idiom.

It begins with Spektor calling for a shake-up before the strings touch off in “Fidelity,” a song of the year candidate if I’ve ever heard one. (Of course, it will have to duke it out with three other songs on this album and that bloody great Gnarls Barkley song for the title). Her liberal shaping of syllables and vowel sounds—her own heart and her phrasing of the word “heart” are unlike any others’—are unpredictable in their metamorphosis from standardized beings to extraordinary dream droplets. She invests in her words on the top half of the album, giving them a rarefied effect that’s untouchable. “Fidelity,” “Samson” and “On The Radio”—a song in which Spektor is a piano at one point and then sings, “This is how it works/You’re young until you’re not/You love until you don’t/You try until you can’t/You laugh until you cry/You cry until you laugh/And everyone must breathe until their dying breath/So this is how it works/You peer inside yourself/You take the things you like and try to love the things you took/And then you take that love you make/And stick it into some/Someone else’s heart/Pumpin’ someone else’s blood”—behave exactly the way a someone you fall in love with should. They reciprocate and requite.

She sings of sleazy old men staring at boobs and cocaine and makes them all affable topics with her surreal way of approaching them. The topics may as well be roasting marshmallows over a fire pit or the migratory habits of the Monarch butterfly for that matter, but she still gives the songs their necessary punch. She’s not singing little girl fairytales, but she’s refreshingly not singing about sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and bragging about spending 40Gs on a grill. She has a mind on her that’s sharp enough to slice a quarter in half with a clean, effortless cut and she uses all of her many faculties to bring these songs to life.

She sings, “I have dreams of Orca whales and owls/But I wake up in fear,” on “Hotel Song,” and I personally fear what she’s cabable of if this is simply her jumping off point. “Begin To Hope” is a salvo to the art of the song, as precious and nebulous as it should always be. Not everything has been done before, thank the goddess Spektor.