Regina Spektor live!

Regina Spektor
Riviera, Chicago
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Regina Spektor’s sold-out performance at Riviera on Sunday night won’t go down as historic for either her, personally, or the grand annals of pop music. It did, however, poke a lot of holes into two primary genres.

Click here for a Flickr gallery of Spektor from Sunday night.

It was only a couple of years ago Spektor was opening for The Strokes, of all bands, as the major-label face of the so-called “freak folk” genre, a national underground of performers (Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom chief among them) injecting untamed psychedelia into common folk patterns. Spektor’s relationship to this was largely through the company she kept; musically she replaced the Incredible String Band with Diamanda Galás and Patti Smith.

In interviews she also repeated her disgust with traditional (especially female) singer-songwriters. In IE she railed at the rote themes of love lost/fended off and suggested pirate themes instead. Her Sire Records debut, Soviet Kitsch, headed in a streamlined direction, but still embraced the eccentricities of her performance-art leanings. Last fall’s Begin To Hope, however, is a glorious collision of everything around her, and it was that which was on display Sunday.

Opening with an a capella rendition of “Ain’t No Cover” — to which she banged on the mic to keep the beat — and later switching between that and guitar, Spektor was more evocative when bending the piano-based Tori Amos/Fiona Apple archetype to her will. Early in the set, “On The Radio” took solace in a DJ accidentally playing “November Rain” twice and gleefully caught Spektor bum-bum-bumming along to her own tune. “Fidelity” likewise cruised on her vocal idiosyncrasies, toying with a girlish chirp and practically making fun of her subject in a rare moment of subversive honesty. The percussive, guitar-led “That Time” used PJ Harvey’s rage idiom to poke fun at how the search for identity led to phases of only smoking Marlboros and then Camels.

While it could be argued a lot of this lampooning goes over the heads of Spektor’s 20-something, mostly female audience — the slower songs were met with an implausible austerity for such a renowned prankster — Spektor helped catch them up by throwing in the comedy of “Bobbing For Apples” (“Somebody next door is fucking to one of my songs”) and lacerating self-deprecation (“Silly Eye Colour Generalizations”). Partially being the things she sends up is essential to her success, but her willingness to step around them is even greater.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly