paradoxicalsentiments:

First Listen: Regina Spektor, ‘What We Saw From The Cheap Seats’

A genuine oddball with a salty side, Regina Spektor possesses a vocal style rangy enough to encompass sweet nothings, animal noises, drum sounds and funny accents. But for all her occasional flights of fancy — or perhaps because her unpredictability makes her sincerity more disarming — Spektor is a skilled sentimentalist whose words summon universal feelings of love, hope, disappointment and desire.

For a classically trained performer with an unusual history — she moved from Moscow to the Bronx when she was 9, then later trained at a music conservatory — Spektor has a remarkable gift for gut-level connection, and for drawing a straight line from her idea-packed head to thousands of bleeding hearts. On What We Saw From the Cheap Seats, as on its predecessors, even the weirdest moment comes in service of warmth that’s as kind and necessary as an old friend.

I am literally shaking as, track-by-track, I listen to this and die a little more with each note. regina sang basically every song off her new album when I saw her live (was that already a week ago?) and the recordings actually do them proper justice

I wasn’t sure if I’d listen ahead of the album’s release date but this is an NPR leak promoted by regina herself so I think it’s okay