The new Regina album: Amazing.

In 2006 Regina Spektor wrote and released a song called "Fidelity". It sounded immediately familiar, and yet at once completely unique. The stark little pizzicato plucks, the soaring melody: you knew this would be a classic right away. Unfortunately this one song completely changed general perception of Regina, despite being fizzingly brilliant. By the time "Fidelity" was being used in the trailer for 27 Dresses, having already been featured in Grey's Anatomy and rocketed up the Billboard Charts, Regina had gone from being perceived as a critically acclaimed songstress heading for assured greatness, to being perceived as one of those artists who have a minor hit off the back of a car commercial and are never heard from again. This is extremely tragic, as Regina is not one of those artists.

In fact, Regina is supremely talented, and here's why: cutesie, eccentric female singer/songwriters are a dime a dozen now, and although Regina at first fits the bill, on closer inspection she is so much more. First off, she can play the piano, and we mean really play. She doesn't just twiddle or pad around, she treats it like the versatile and many-voiced instrument it is. On her first few albums, songs were scattered with odd, single-finger notes, placed ingeniously in patterns to create interesting and staccato shapes. On Far, her most recent record, the songs are all underscored by a sort of rumbling, neo-romantic alberti bass. Chords and riffs ripple and fluctuate like a Brahms piano sonata. And that's not all. Structurally, Regina doesn't ever play by the rules. Stopping, starting, building, shifting. Her songs are inventive in a way most artists never even come close to achieving. You literally never know where she will go next, when she will stop or what startling musical choice she will make. Deeply uncool tuba figures stud "Two Birds". "Dance Anthem of the 80s" features a bizarre chorus-effect solo. "Blue Lips" begins with a single stoic organ note, and goes rippling into a full blown ballad.

These are not the songs of a random, hippy-dippy chick who got lucky and scored the Mac ad for the next generation of iPods. These are the songs of a warped genius, crafting skewed and inventive pop/folk songs with her entirely unique musical vocabulary. Which is why it makes us angry when we read such lazy and patronising reviews of her work. If it weren't for "Fidelity" (as brilliant as it is) we would be reading gushing praise, calling her a trailblazer, but instead we get badly-researched and dismissive guff about her being "odd" but "samey" as if she's not in it for the long run. It's a good thing she's got a huge fan base to back her up. After all, Tori Amos, goddess and genius has spent years being patronised because she's female and 'eccentric'. It's just a shame that most pop music journalism about women is so unjustly 'meh', except when it's about Lily Allen, of course.

Recommendations
"Blue Lips [Live]" - Regina Spektor
"Consequence of Sounds [Live]" - Regina Spektor
"Human of the Year" - Regina Spektor