Regina Spektor [ tickets ] is an odd little story. Russian-born, her family fled the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's perestroika. They made their way to New York, losing their classically trained girl's piano on the way, and she made do with windowsills and tabletops.

Eventually, she earned a small measure of local fame for herself and caught the attention of Julian Casablanca of The Strokes. The end result, right now, is this album, a mostly pastoral collection of quiet, thoughtful songs, featuring Spektor accompanying herself on piano, with an occasional flourish of strings.

There are influences here ranging from Tori Amos to Elliott Smith, and Spektor's simple, plaintive voice sounds closer to Chan Marshall on pieces like the album's opener, "Ode to Divorce," a simple-but-lush discourse on ... panhandling? Her songs don't seem to have much, if anything at all, to do with their titles, and Spektor's songwriting sense throughout seems designed to simply accompany her elegant, accomplished piano runs with phonetically appropriate syllables.

Which is not to say she doesn't turn a decent phrase here and there, albeit whispered from the mouth of a self-aware naif persona: "You don't love your girlfriend/And you think that you should but she thinks that she's fat/But she isn't but you don't love her anyway," she sings on "Poor Little Rich Boy," plinking at the piano with one hand while drumming on a stool with the other, almost as if she were deliberately attempting to summon the muse of Daniel Johnston.

There is a real threat of preciousness going on here in her weaker moments; a "song" like "Regina and Bear Spektor Whispers"--consisting entirely of, well, whispering--is simply awful and annoying. Spektor, however, wisely keeps this tendency to a minimum, and the best of her songs move with a simple, pleasant vibe that is probably enough to sustain continued interest.