Grooves

 

Regina Spektor
Soviet Kitsch (Sire) Soviet Kitsch

I'll admit, when I first saw Jason Mraz on TV two years ago, I thought he was brilliant – the fresh-faced harbinger, maybe, of a newly frenetic, slightly crazed acousticism that is so, so necessary after John Mayer single-handedly made pop go limp. Little did I know that salvation would come via a 24-year-old Russian émigré crooning piano-driven ditties, playfully and profoundly, the way Nabokov used to pen poetic intros. Where Mraz's overproduced Waiting for My Rocket to Come (Elektra) got lost in the studio, Regina Spektor's Sire debut, Soviet Kitsch (originally released exclusively online via CD Baby, iTunes, and other services in August 2004 and now available as a CD-DVD), offers polished coffeehouse songs that dip, swoop, and soar between keys, genres, and emotional registers. Spektor preens and pleads, melodically darts and satirically jabs – all with a willfully perverse glibness revealing an artist in love with vernacular quirks the rest of us natives are too numb to notice.

Folk traditionalists will probably hate this album. Irony courses throughout like a bad habit but an aesthetic and moral necessity. The most straightforward, pathos-riven ballad, "Somedays" begins, "Some days aren't yours at all / They come and go as if they're someone else's days," before taking this stunning, melismatic turn: "I'm in love with your daugh-ter / I wanna have her-er bay-ay-ay-by." This is more than gimmicky postmodern pastiche. In its seamless modulations, volatile song structures, and rapid mood swings, Soviet Kitsch is quintessential urban music, but more than that too. To enter Spektor's misleadingly labeled "antifolk" world is to hear a folk idiom that keeps expanding, like the universe: heartbeats as bass lines (credit producer Gordon Raphael, of the Strokes' Is This It fame), drumsticks hitting chairs for percussion, and a singer-songwriter cooing like a dove, scatting polka, telling Dickensian parables ("The Ghost of Corporate Future"), and mouthing the word kiss four times, ritardando, to emulate a kiss's slow-motion feel or its echoes in the memory. Listen closely enough and you can almost hear your atomized self being put back together again. (Kevin Y. Kim)

Marianne Faithfull
 Before the Poison (Anti) Before the Poison

Watching Marianne Faithfull's 1968 appearance on the DVD of Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, it's hard to imagine she would enter 2005 about 1,000 times cooler than the Stones could ever hope to be. Dolled up, probably doped up, Faithfull sits and delivers an unremarkable reading of "Something Better" while the Stones, approaching the zenith of their drugged-out Satanic period, absolutely rip it up in a performance they long dismissed as subpar.

Flash forward some 37 years. While the Stones have long since entered the realm of irrelevance, Faithfull, who's known as something of a comeback kid to begin with – 1979's Broken English (Island) was hailed as the first, though anybody with any knowledge of her career will note there have been more than a few good moments, including 1974's Rich Kid Blues (Diablo Records UK) – reappears in the solidly hip and ultracompetent musical company of PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Damon Albarn, and Jon Brion with her most solid release since, well, Broken English.

Faithfull, who has often collaborated with other artists and producers – 2002's less successful Kissin Time (Virgin) featured Beck, Billy Corgan, and Jarvis Cocker – finally seems to have found the sympathetic writers her voice requires. Harvey, who wrote the bulk of the material, provides Faithfull with some of the finest moments. "The Mystery of Love" and "My Friends Have" get great, emotionally nuanced readings, with supercharged musical backup from Harvey and Rob Ellis. Songs cowritten by Faithful and Cave, "Crazy Love" and "There Is a Ghost" are just as strong in an opposite direction, featuring the delicate musicianship of approximately half of Cave's Bad Seeds. Albarn provides the great "Last Song," which almost out-Caves Cave, and Brion's at bat comes last, with the wonderful "City of Quartz" (a nod to Mike Davis's great book about Los Angeles?).

Faithfull's voice, almost an odd cross between Marlene Dietrich's and Tom Waits's, is ultimately and uniquely her own. On many of her recordings over the past 20 years, she seemed a little detached and unfocused, but here she tears into the material and gives the songs theatrical, been-around-the-block renditions only someone as worldly as Faithfull could. Perhaps, considering her recent trip through San Francisco in Robert Wilson, William S. Burroughs, and Waits's play The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, this shouldn't be a surprise. Faithfull's known potential has been high for long time, but it's nice to hear her embrace it fully again. (Victor Krummenacher)

Amos Lee
 Amos Lee (Blue Note)

Blue Note Records, the venerable jazz label, is banking on Amos Lee for its second major pop breakthrough and has brought along labelmate Norah Jones to help insure the investment. Jones, however, plays only a minor role, supplying harmony vocals and keyboards here and there. The Philadelphian's maiden voyage in big-time showbiz is his own affair, through and through – a singer-songwriter debut so auspicious it's sure to rank in the annals alongside those of Bill Withers, John Prine, Phoebe Snow, and Tracy Chapman, to cite a few obvious comparisons.

Call it soul-folk, if you need a tag. There's definitely a blue tinge to Lee's aching tenor voice and rhythmic turns of phrase, as well as in the sweetly stinging solos of former Bay Area guitarist Adam Levy (a vet of the Chapman and Jones bands) and the understated Booker T. Jones-like B-3 chords of Devin Greenwood. And James Gadson, the drummer on many of Withers's greatest hits, turns up on a couple of cuts. The music is far from R&B, however, with Lee's fingerpicked acoustic guitar giving it a gentle folk flavor throughout.

Lee writes simple melodies that cling to the brain and poetry that tugs at the heartstrings. "Everybody wanna treat me like a housefly / Turn me around and tell me to shoo," he complains on "Dreamin'," the bluesiest of the CD's 11 tunes. Loneliness is a recurring theme. "I'm at ease in the arms of a woman / Although most of my days are spent alone," he declares on "Arms of a Woman," a haunting ballad reminiscent of Otis Redding's "I've Got Dreams to Remember." On "Black River," he posits three possible roads to redemption: "one dear savior," "sweet whiskey," and the suicide implied by the song title. Lee offers no answers to the human condition – just some poignant new insights. Amos Lee opens for Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard March 14-16, Paramount Theatre, Oakl. (510) 465-6400, www.ticketmaster.com. (Lee Hildebrand)