Regina Spektor has been favorably (if not always accurately) compared to so many notable artists – from Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey to Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald – that it's difficult not to roll your eyes. It's also difficult not to react with suspicion to her status as the current darling of New York's “anti-folk” movement, a heady if nebulous accolade previously bestowed on everyone from Beck to San Diego-bred Cindy Lee Berryhill.
Difficult, that is, until you hear Spektor's wonderfully idiosyncratic music. It sounds just right for a classically trained Russian singer-songwriter who is equally steeped in the work of The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Tchaikovsky, and who embraces her eccentricities in a way that is unique to a binational outsider.
Spektor's best songs suggest a missing link between Tori Amos, Bjork and Joni Mitchell, assuming that missing link was a Russian native who immigrated with her family from Moscow to the Bronx when she was 9 and then struggled to fit in. She's an Old World soul in a New World reality, and what results in her absorbing music pays tribute to her East-meets-West heritage.
DATEBOOK
Regina Spektor, with Only Son
8 p.m. Sunday;
'Canes, 3105 Ocean Front Walk, Mission Beach;
$12.50 (advance), $15 (day of show);
(619) 220-TIXS
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“It's definitely a huge part of me,” said Spektor, 26, who makes her San Diego debut Sunday night at 'Canes in Mission Beach.
“First of all, you feel this (old) world, in which your parents, grandparents and childhood reside. You also have all the literature and art that comes with that, and the language. Then, you have the new world, which is very modern and is sort of your future, and you are always trying to keep the two connected. So, it's kind of like making these little sutures to keep the two worlds together.”
Ironically, it was only after she and her scientist father and music conservatory professor mother fled Russia in 1989 to live in New York that Spektor began to learn much about her Jewish roots.
“It was so anti-Semitic in the Soviet Union that I really was only able to learn about my (religious) traditions in the school where I went in the Bronx,” she said, speaking from a tour stop last week outside Denver.
Released in June, Spektor's fourth and newest album, “Begin to Hope,” is her first that finds her singing in Russian, albeit sparingly.
Her largely unaccented vocals can be girlish one moment, sexy or silly the next, while her unique phrasing is full of unexpected pauses and quirky syncopations and accents. Her unorthodox but beguiling songs are constructed in a manner that strikes a neat balance between her formal classical training and a deceptive form of improvisation – musically and lyrically – that is both daring and carefully considered.
“It's like cooking, not from a recipe, but spontaneously,” she explained of her songwriting. “And you know that you don't want to just put something sweet or salty or sour into it. Then, it's just about the degree of how much you're in the mood for, and of what.”
Spektor, who has a degree in studio composition, said: “I just pulled that metaphor out of my hat. And, yes, I am a good cook!”
