(no subject)
If the earth's gravitational pull seems a little bit off tonight, blame the concentration of nerd boner in New Haven. Regina Spektor had a show tonight, and the audience seemed to be primarily composed of the nerdy horny guy contingent of the pretentious toolish socially awkward hipsters that seem to dominate the show scene here. Apparently she had a cold and mentioned the that she was hocking loogies into toilet paper in between songs, and someone in the audience yelled "i'll have it"... multiple times.
The show itself was strong - there's no question that Regina has a good voice and knows what she's doing when it comes to the piano. Much of it was note-for-note true to the sound on the albums, which I found somewhat surprising considering the high degree of quirkiness that is the trademark of her music. At the beginning of the concert there was a certain excitement and energy and it reminded me of what an early-ish Tori Amos show might have been like. Regina even had a Tori-esque look, with full lips and full hair, mimicking Tori's heart-breaking paradox of self-conscious plain-girl mannerisms while looking absolutely stunning. She's no Tori, however. Like the perfectly timed quirkiness, the show was almost overwhelming in its cuteness, getting in the way of what could be her winning strength: her ability to relate to her audience, and their willingness to relate to her. In the middle of her first song, she made some sort of undetectable mistake with one of the lines, and stopped, acting fakely cotrite about "fucking up." The crowd went wild, yelling, "we love you anyway!" And love her they did, through her eye-batting and vocal flourish, until she started playing "Carbon Monoxide," and the crowd came to the slow realization that she made two albums before the catchy, listenable Begin to Hope. Which brings us to another major difference between Regina and Tori: Tori's third album, Boys for Pele, is so emotionally damaging and difficult that you feel like you've just taken the SAT II in French Literature with a raging hangover, and gotten your score back. She didn't get watery and radio-ready until Venus. While BtH is hardly watery, it does lack some of the raw weirdness that drew me to Soviet Kitsch. My high school choir director used to maintain that if you noticed the lights during a performance, something was wrong. Regina's voice teachers must have had a different idea, because in the middle of the show they busted out one of those spinning disco ball deals, which added to the nerds-at-middle-school-dance ambience. The contrived feeling of the show culminated in her decision to leave "Samson" for the encore, and then to bring her band back for one last song (the one about orca whales, the name of which escapes me). Her band was good, if a bit bedraggled. Surely with its downshift in weirdness, her latest album has sold enough copies that she can buy her band some shampoo and a trip to Fantastic Sam's?
It was a good show, and I'm glad I went. But now that it's over, I just want to sit back, put on some Tori Amos, and imagine that I, too, might be one fuck-up away from being queen of the nerd prom.
The show itself was strong - there's no question that Regina has a good voice and knows what she's doing when it comes to the piano. Much of it was note-for-note true to the sound on the albums, which I found somewhat surprising considering the high degree of quirkiness that is the trademark of her music. At the beginning of the concert there was a certain excitement and energy and it reminded me of what an early-ish Tori Amos show might have been like. Regina even had a Tori-esque look, with full lips and full hair, mimicking Tori's heart-breaking paradox of self-conscious plain-girl mannerisms while looking absolutely stunning. She's no Tori, however. Like the perfectly timed quirkiness, the show was almost overwhelming in its cuteness, getting in the way of what could be her winning strength: her ability to relate to her audience, and their willingness to relate to her. In the middle of her first song, she made some sort of undetectable mistake with one of the lines, and stopped, acting fakely cotrite about "fucking up." The crowd went wild, yelling, "we love you anyway!" And love her they did, through her eye-batting and vocal flourish, until she started playing "Carbon Monoxide," and the crowd came to the slow realization that she made two albums before the catchy, listenable Begin to Hope. Which brings us to another major difference between Regina and Tori: Tori's third album, Boys for Pele, is so emotionally damaging and difficult that you feel like you've just taken the SAT II in French Literature with a raging hangover, and gotten your score back. She didn't get watery and radio-ready until Venus. While BtH is hardly watery, it does lack some of the raw weirdness that drew me to Soviet Kitsch. My high school choir director used to maintain that if you noticed the lights during a performance, something was wrong. Regina's voice teachers must have had a different idea, because in the middle of the show they busted out one of those spinning disco ball deals, which added to the nerds-at-middle-school-dance ambience. The contrived feeling of the show culminated in her decision to leave "Samson" for the encore, and then to bring her band back for one last song (the one about orca whales, the name of which escapes me). Her band was good, if a bit bedraggled. Surely with its downshift in weirdness, her latest album has sold enough copies that she can buy her band some shampoo and a trip to Fantastic Sam's?
It was a good show, and I'm glad I went. But now that it's over, I just want to sit back, put on some Tori Amos, and imagine that I, too, might be one fuck-up away from being queen of the nerd prom.