Regina Spektor: Soviet Kitsch (yellow vinyl, indie exclusive) [SIRE]

Why you'll love it

This indie exclusive pressing comes on yellow vinyl with a double-sided lyric sheet. Soviet Kitsch was the record that took Spektor from New York's anti-folk scene to Sire, and NME named it one of the 100 greatest albums of the decade.

This edition

• Yellow vinyl
• Indie exclusive
• Lyric sheet included
• Pressed in the Netherlands

About the album

Regina Spektor left Moscow for the Bronx at nine and a half, and had to leave her piano behind. She more than made up for it, raised on classical music and Russian bards, with her father's traded cassettes adding The Beatles and Queen. By the early 2000s she was a fixture of the East Village anti-folk scene, and her third self-made album, issued on Shoplifter in 2003, became her calling card when Sire reissued it in 2004.

She produced it with Gordon Raphael and Alan Bezozi, recording at TMF in New York and The Garden in London. "Ode to Divorce" opens with a hush, "Poor Little Rich Boy" bangs and clatters, and "Us" swells into one of her loveliest melodies. "Carbon Monoxide" and "The Flowers" are wry and theatrical, "Your Honor" turns up the volume, and the hidden "* * *" features her brother Boruch, before "Chemo Limo" and "Somedays" close on a tender note.

Kate Nash has called it a record she became obsessed with, and Begin to Hope followed two years later. Spektor brings classical training to a pop song the way some people bring a good umbrella to a picnic, quietly and to everyone's eventual benefit.

Also at Kops: more Regina Spektor on vinyl · browse Singer-Songwriter

Tracklist

Listen

On Sire, a reissue of the 2003 album.