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The tunes are consistently fetching, and a few standouts have clever lyrics.
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Regina has basically mastered everything else too; it's hard to see her making a wrong move anytime soon.
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The fables and fantasy lives they depict are rendered in fairly understandable terms. Yet Far still shows the range that Spektor can travel within her dreamy world.
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playing the freak also makes her blissfully unself-conscious, and that can be contagious. Nothing's more heartfelt than 'Wallet,' an ode to a stranger who lost his.
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A couple of tracks--'Machine' and 'Human Of The Year'--never quite crawl out of the shadow of their high concepts, but Far otherwise cements Spektor as an artist comfortable with her own eccentricities, and beguiling in her ability to bring listeners into her strange, tempestuous, and often beautiful world.
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With her third Sire album, the deliciously attractive Far, Spektor again shows how original she is, finding the gleam in modern life with its contradictions and confusion in a uniquely colloquial manner.
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Tired of her peculiar singer-songwriter pop being a fringe taste, the Russian-born New Yorker's gone for the commercial jugular, polishing her strangeness with help from ELO's Jeff Lynne among others.
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Far snuggles between her previous efforts, linking the heady sweep of 2003's "Soviet Kitsch" to the roundabout pop treats of "Begin to Hope."
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Far is a bright and gratifying listen; one that doesn’t aim at ideas above its station or flounder in search of unity.
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Far is her best album yet, and while it's a long way from early works such as Soviet Kitsch or 11:11, it perfectly illustrates the evolution of a woman who's becoming a truly great artist.
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Far matches "Kitsch's" rococo flow with the follow-up's pop smarts.
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It is worth repeating that Far takes everything Regina Spektor has done in the near ten-year span of her career and mashes it up to perfection.
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Every song on this--her fifth--album sparkles with intelligence.
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MojoThis is an adventurous, joyful album from a major talent. [Aug 2009, p.98]
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Q MagazineShe's making a bid for the mainstream, even recruiting ex-ELO mainman Jeff Lyne to her corner on five tracks, including grandiose highlight 'Human Of The Year,' a three-minute distillation of the album's overriding facination with religion. [Aug 2009, p.104]
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FilterHer new environs are distinctly different to the basement recordings of her past, but the friends she brings along preserve some of the intimacy and spontaneity of the dramtis personae that earns her the adjective, "Spektorian." [Summer 2009, p.91]
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Far, her new album, will likely be criticized for its continuing drift towards the centre.
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Under The RadarWhile some of Far covers ground Spektor's already gone over, she's essentially doing what she does best. [Summer 2009, p.62]
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I was surprised that it holds up well to close scrutiny--in spite of my reservations, the album is well performed and crafted, with a surprisingly mordant thematic unity touching on mortality and the soured promises of childhood--but I’m still bothered by its anonymity.
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While Far is far from bad, it doesn't quite live up to expectations, either, based on all the talent involved in making it and how fully Spektor expressed herself on "Begin to Hope."
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Here she leaves behind the flaky-as-adorable posturing long enough to salvage Far from its role as capricious sideshow, and so, too, long enough for listeners to get a glimpse of the songwriting talent that lurks beneath the peculiarity.
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She's always interesting; for all the nonsense, Spektor is a writer with something to say.
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Frankly it makes our blood run cold with images of Sunday supplement purgatory, Spektor trading soft-focus licks with Katie Meluah from out of suburban glove compartments for decades to come. Thankfully the reality is nowhere near as bad as that.
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Far goes some distance to halt a slide into mere radio-friendly pleasantness, though.
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'One More Time With Feeling's' dynamics shift and her lyrics are vague, but carry a heartfelt sentiment. Far has too little of this and winds up being a mixed bag.
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No less than four producers--Mike Elizondo, David Kahne, Jeff Lynne and Garret “Jacknife” Lee--contributed to the album, and their collective efforts have resulted in a mid-tempo muddle of pseudo-lovely tracks plagued by a hovering cloud of meddling strings, slappy drums and perfunctory triangle chimes.
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Unfortunately, all this talent behind the boards often feels like a waste because of Spektor's inability to let her songs stand on their own merits without the persistent interjection of vocal curlicues or verbal flights of fancy.
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UncutThroughout, there's an ungainly combination of the leaden and the jaunty. [Aug 2009, p.102]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 59 out of 73
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Mixed: 4 out of 73
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Negative: 10 out of 73
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JeremySep 16, 2009
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Nov 22, 2021Regina Spektor keeps her charm and witty lyrics present in this wonderful album
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Aug 22, 2018