Most of Spektor’s songs are ornate narratives or character studies, as dense as short stories and as vivid as movies. Her trio of musicians – drums, keyboards, cello – do a fine job of replicating the grand scope of her albums, especially last year’s Remember Us to Life. Unlike her 2003 tourmates, she has got better with age, crafting a distinct but versatile sound from strands of rock, jazz, folk, musical theatre, Russian classical music and, on Small Bill$, even hip-hop. These aren’t the songs you’d choose if you wanted to convince someone that Spektor is a songwriter of substance.Īt the piano, though, she’s something else. Bobbing for Apples has one very good line – “Someone next door’s fucking to one of my songs” – but she repeats it until the joke is dead. The dark whimsy is too gauche, the delivery too cute. When she straps on an aquamarine electric guitar to play That Time, she resembles an ingenue in an East Village coffee shop. To be fair, a couple of Spektor’s early songs give the doubters ammunition. Infantilisation is the abiding curse of ambitious female singer-songwriters with a taste for the theatrical.
Tori Amos, Björk and Kate Bush know that feeling too. They’re both formidable songwriters, too often dismissed as “kooky” and “quirky” because they like magic realist narratives, because their voices sometimes creak and squeak, and, frankly, because they’re women. The last time I saw such intense and occasionally clammy reverence was when Joanna Newsom played the same venue.
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