Review Roundup: Javina Magness, Regina Spektor, and Flagship Romance

A packed album release schedule in June and a rare two week vacation by yours truly means I am once again faced with the “multiple albums, two ears” dilemma. So it's time for another Review Roundup. This week, I've got reviews of two recent albums from artists about as far apart in the Americana tent as you can get as well as featuring the release of a single, which I rarely do but this one you'll want to hear.

Janiva Magness- Hard to Kill (June 24)
There are some artists whose fame differs wildly based on audience. Janiva Magness is the dictionary definition of that artist. Never a household name in the music mainstream, Magness becomes a bonafide megastar when you step into the blues music community. The accolades speak for themselves. She's a seven-time Blues Music Award recipient, including being only the second woman to receive the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year Award, and a Grammy Award nominee. Her 15 previous albums have been mainstays on the blues music charts and she remains a highly sought artist on the blues festival scene. After penning her bare-all memoir Weeds Like Us in 2019, she got to work on her new album but quickly realized that many of the same themes of hardship, survival, and internal drive were emerging as themes on the album as well. So the album, Hard to Kill, was scheduled to release simultaneously with the audiobook of Weeds Like Us. In many ways, Hard to Kill is a musical memoir for Magness. In the album's twelve songs, you'll find hard edged electric blues (“Strong as Steel”), heart rending ballads (“Oh Pearl”), and pure Detroit soul (“I'm Still Here”). Entering the third decade of her career, Janiva Magness has more than proven herself Hard to Kill, and anyone who loves the blues should be very happy.

Regina Spektor- Home, Before and After (June 24)
I may be the only person on Earth who found Regina Spektor by way of Thomas Dolby. While I knew of her in the same way anyone who follows music knows the name of artists who are charting, I had never dabbled in her music. When she made an appearance on Dolby's “Evil Twin Brother” from A Map of the Floating City in 2011, most people probably didn't even know it was her. The cameo was brief, spoken, and in Russian. But Spektor put so much noir intrigue into the few words she had to portray the seductive waitress in a shady bar who leads the protagonist astray that I knew I had to check her out. The rest, as they say, is history. Home, Before and After is Spektor's first album since 2016's Remember Us to Life and that's just far too long. Fortunately, Home, Before and After delivers. There are few artists who can balance whimsy and pathos the way Spektor can and she's managed to hone that edge even finer on this album. The sing-song schoolkid atmosphere of “Loveology” (“let's go to the movies, I will hum you a song about nothing at all”) exists companionably alongside the devastation of “One Man's Prayer” (“If I won't get to meet God and I won't get to be a God, then at least, God, let me be noticed”), culminating in the almost nine minute masterpiece of the album, “Spacetime Fairytale”, which bounces between moody (“I should get up by I instead make a face you used to make”) and uplifting (“I know there's no such thing as time. I know there's no such thing as mine. I'll try to sing a melody your way”). Like that mysterious Russian waitress in the Dolby tune, Regina Spektor keeps luring me away from the review album I should be listening to and back into the depths of her song.

Flagship Romance- “You're the One That I Want”
Since I've been heading up the review section of Concert Hopper, I don't think I've ever reviewed a single. I also have a long standing dislike of any musical not starring Monty Python (Spamalot for the win!). I say those to emphasize how much Flagship Romance's slower, less theatrical, more musically substantive take on Olivia Newton-John's candy floss Grease single “You're the One That I Want” impressed me. Released as a surprise thank you to their fans for a fully funded Kickstarter campaign, it's one of those transformations that you hear and wonder how the heck no one thought to do it before.