Regina Spektor – All The Rowboats

I think it’s fair to say I expected more controversy here. Happy now, Googlers?

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Iain Mew: For “All the Rowboats,” Regina takes a dazzling creative idea which turns the world upside down – what if art was alive and by revering it we were suffocating it? The logic of the narrative would crumble in the presence of too much analysis (what would the paintings prefer?), but she uses that idea to tell so compelling a story that for the duration of the song I never wanted to think about the plot holes; it’s the same tightrope that the best bits of Doctor Who have been particularly adept at walking in recent years. She crafts a series of evocative images without overselling them, with a backing that’s a similar victory for imagination with restraint. The way that she sings “masterpieces serving maximum sentences” and “here’s your ticket, welcome to the tombs” with a kind of grim satisfaction at perverse justice being served is chilling. The music finally rearing up behind the section about the poor violins, and the terrifying final coup de grâce take the song over the edge to my favourite song of 2012 so far.
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Anthony Easton: Maybe I could use all of the rowboats to take me away from this self-consciously precious, terribly obvious rip off of people who are both better and weirder.
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Brad Shoup: It’s probably unfair to call this ponderous, even though all Spektor does is ponder.
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Jonathan Bogart: Regina Spektor’s half-cabaret, half-art-pop was one of the most pleasing sounds of my mid-00s. The mid-00s are well over by now.
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Alfred Soto: As if the world needed more tinkling preciousness.
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Edward Okulicz: Sure, Spektor’s derivative musically, but the way she plays with her intonation, sounding like a zombie on later iterations of the title line, is all her, and if this song is one thud away from being awful, then as far as I’m concerned the thud is worth all the points it deserves.
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Jer Fairall: There’s the ongoing disappointment that she’ll probably never again surprise me with her music, not after Begin To Hope made the permanent move to cloaking her oddball songs in ornate and often very lovely surroundings rather than let the unpredictability of her words and her voice thrust her sonics into similar chaos. She gives it her best here, though, mimicking a synth bass in such a way that casts confusion on whether it is in fact all voice, all machine (cheekily present on the swirly intro and then backing off, abruptly, to let Regina’s voice and piano in) or, as is likely the case, an awkwardly stitched combination of the two. For the most part, though, “All The Rowboats” is left to work as text, and as such it is a lofty and even provocative one, personifying Art as a kind of fidgety, disobedient child looking to escape authority and decorum the second no one is looking. Regina’s gift is imbuing it with her usual buoyant, urgent delivery, suggesting that she, contrary to her words, is less the sympathetic spectator to these entombed artifacts than one of the subjects rendered in oil, looking to make a break for it the minute the nightwatchman steps out for a coffee break.
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Michaela Drapes: Indulge me this, just this once: I first heard this song almost immediately after watching the contentious documentary The Art of the Steal, about the storied history of the Barnes Collection’s relocation from its site-specific gallery in suburban Pennsylvania to a new flashy home in Philadelphia’s tourist quarter, and I am convinced that this song is about that terrible tale. OK, OK…maybe it’s not entirely about that fucked up state of affairs, but Spektor does seem to masterfully squirm around some of the most troubling questions about art in the 21st century – ownership, copyright, and the big money made from selling the experience of seeing crushingly important art in the flesh.
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Katherine St Asaph: Regina Spektor’s big reintroduction, it turns out, is actually a rework from 2005, and it’s all about artwork in museums being stifled because they’re like people with feelings. But two things keep “All the Rowboats” from being bone-meltingly twee. The track’s closer to “Apres Moi” than “Fidelity,” which is like being closer to a dramatic ballgown than a babydoll dirndl with a bird on it, and Mike Elizondo provides sturm und drums the lyrics don’t really. The end result’s a lot like Charlotte Martin, and how can I fault that?
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Sabina Tang: In diametric opposition to the Exo-M track, here Regina Spektor’s lyrics stand out while the piano-led arrangement gets the job done. Unfortunately, the moody viewpoint she posits is so different from the emotional vibe I get from seeing masterpieces in galleries that I just want to throw down and argue it out.
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