Regina Spektor Home, before and after LP

TAS Rated 5/5 Music, 4/5 Sonics in the October 2022 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Regina is a Soviet-born American singer-songwriter and pianist. She was born in the Soviet Union where she began classical training on the piano at the age of six. When she was nine years old, her family immigrated to the United States where she continued her classical training into her teenage years; she began to write original songs shortly thereafter.

After self-releasing her first three records and gaining popularity in New York City's independent music scenes, particularly the anti-folk scene centered on New York City's East Village, Spektor signed with Sire Records in 2004 where she began achieving greater mainstream notoriety.

Home, before and after is Regina Spektor's eighth studio album and most quintessentially "New York" in decades.

Recorded in upstate New York and produced by Spektor and John Congleton, the album is Spektor at her most inspired, heralded by "Becoming All Alone," a surrealist ballad that swells with arrangements and comes alive in your head.

For [Spektor's] eighth studio album, Home, before and after, she animates ten unpredictable tracks with a combination of elegant piano accompaniment, overtly playful pop, and a return to dramatic symphonic fare, often within the same song. The set list is tied together by equally audacious lyrics...Odd, fun, smart, and fearless throughout...

Regina Spektor is a musical free spirit whose songs develop in unpredictable ways while her lyrics seem completely unfiltered. At turns perplexing, playful, and riveting, those lyrics can seem deeply personal in one line and Big Picture in the next, yet in spite of (or because of) Spektor's idiosyncrasies she's built a loyal fan base, which means that, after a six-year gap between LPs, they should be hoping for a home run. If so, they won't be disappointed. Working in tandem with co-producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten), Spektor wanders freely between piano-based intimacy and lush soundscapes.