From the moment she appeared on the unusual York anti-folk scene,Regina Spektor’s genre-leaping music and vivid storytelling maintain defied categorisation and inspired a unusual generation of singer-songwriters
proper to her roots as a Russian refugee, Regina Spektor is a musical matryoshka doll. Beneath the outer shell of a butter-wouldn’t-melt songstress-next-door lies a sassy, and streetwise unusual York scene queen with the Strokes on speed-dial. Inside that lurks a proud Slavic traditionalist boasting throwaway put-downs so barbed she could ghostwrite Frankie Boyle’s columns. Within that is a babblin’,wild-child party girl, and within that, and at her core,trembles a fragile romantic negotiating a world of drugs, violence, and terminal illness,infidelity and sexual power struggles like a Russian Red Riding Hood lost in America’s urban forest. She’s a whole city’s worth of voices, personas and stories gushing from one woman at a Steinway, and she flips and juggles between them with the dexterity of a cup-and-ball conman or a quick-change artiste. Spektor is a spectacle.
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Source: theguardian.com