Far from the old Regina

For the length of her career, Regina Spektor has set herself apart from other female singer-songwriters with eccentricities and vocal quirks that make each song distinctly, well, Spektor. They're all over the place, each as unexpected and welcome as the next - a confident beatbox here, a seamless animal impression there.

On her last release, Begin to Hope, she sang "Hey, remember that month when I only ate boxes of tangerines?/ So cheap and juicy!" And she projected that last word, "juicy," with all the excitement of a 3-year-old, juices from that tasty snack caked to her face. Why just sing your words, she seemed to ask, if you can also play with them?

With her latest, Far, Spektor has scaled back on all these quirks rather noticeably. The album is much more polished than previous releases, and full band arrangements on songs become the norm. It asks the listener to look for the songwriting talents of Spektor herself. Is all her weirdness just a facade? Is there truly something worth listening to underneath?

In a word, yes. It shouldn't be any secret Spektor is immensely talented. She has great control of her voice, which she can raise extremely high or dip very low. Her piano can be commanding and urgent just as often as it can be soft and delicate.

The arrangements fit perfectly, too. While "Machine" benefits from an industrialized percussion rattling in the background, the sparser arrangements for "Laughing With" keep the focus on the strength of Spektor's voice.

However, the lack of those trademark Spektor's idiosyncrasies work against her. There are thousands of talented female singer-songwriters with great voices, so as unique as her voice tends to be, what is there left to truly separate her from the pack now?

Unfortunately, not much. Far is the next step in Spektor's gradual shift towards a more mainstream sound. The consolation, however, is the flavor of the songs are similar to her previous work. She's not compromising her talent, just smoothing out the rawness she's been prone to in the past.

"Laughing With" is still a gorgeous ballad, as is "Blue Lips" (written in the "saddest of all keys," no less). "Human of the Year" is the album's token giver of goosebumps, as Spektor belts the chorus soulfully.

And, hey, "Folding Chair" has a pretty spot-on dolphin impression from the songstress that fits surprisingly well with the music, so not all is lost for longtime fans of the artist.

Those four songs (excluding "Human of the Year," maybe) are all ripe choices for singles. As the album moves towards its homestretch, though, the quality begins to dip. While "Dance Anthem" somehow recovers from a flimsy beginning through Spektor's vocal acrobatics, "The Wallet" is a hokey story of finding a wallet (if you couldn't guess), which doesn't fit in with the more solid lyricism of the rest of the album.

Many other songs are simply skippable tracks that stand between the outstanding ones.

It's strange to think about a Regina Spektor album as a collection of great singles split by sections of filler. Her past efforts generally distributed the quality evenly among most tracks, and the idea of Spektor blasting into the mainstream has never been something that required much thought.

But that's precisely what Far is. It's not nearly her best album, but it's the album that will get her the recognition she's deserved for a long time.

jwolper@umd.edu

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars