Prefacing her new album, the verbosely titled The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver of The Screw And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (out June 19) with a seven year waiting period should've left Fiona Apple's latest collection of musical bruised fruit completely crippled under a smothering layer of "importance," gestating in a sealed vacuum of creative expectations and critical laurels. It is an important album… arguably Apple's most important to date… but not for the reasons you might think. Produced by Fiona and her long-time drummer Charlie Drayton, The Idler Wheel is a stark, foreboding, barely there skeleton of an album: raw, impulsive and immediate as the emotions it serves up… miles away from the recording studio warmth of the Jon Brion records.
Listen to The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver of The Screw And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do in its entirety right here
It's not a "dark" album, per se… though it has none of the boisterous whimsy of Extraordinary Machine, either. Neither solemn nor light, the songs here move to their own aesthetic beat, exposing itself over an emotionally confrontational slab of austere piano exercises and delicately bustling percussive arrangements. First single "Every Single Night" borrows next to nothing from the first single playbook—"The rib is a shell / the heart is a yolk / and I just made a meal for us both to choke on," she coos wryly over the quiet wail of its unfastened rhythms. On the sputtering "Daredevil," she remarks, "I guess I just must be a daredevil / I don't feel anything until I smash it up" over a pair of tumbling drums and thick, guttural acoustic bass. Lyrically, the violent undertones are striking in both force and number—even at its more traditionally romantic moments ("If I'm butter, then he's a hot knife…"), the threat of force remains imminent.
Check Out Fiona Apple's Wondrously Weird "Every Single Night" Video
"You didn't see my valentine / I sent it via pantomime," she laments on the acerbic "Valentine," "While you were watching someone else / I stared at you and cut myself / It's all I'll do 'cause I'm not free / A fugitive too dull to flee / I'm amorous, but out reach / A still-life drawing of a beach." Ouch. Elsewhere, on the deceptively playful "Werewolf," she muses, "I could liken you to a werewolf / the way you left me for dead / but I admit that I provided a full moon," later concluding that, "We could still support each other / All we gotta do is avoid each other / Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key." It's plenty obvious that a healthy dose of hurt went into these songs (perhaps most noticeably on "Jonathan," an ominous kiss-off to Fiona's ex, writer Jonathan Ames, that walks a thin line between confessional and awkward), but she never wallows in her various depressions. On the album's most disarmingly optimistic moment, a lusty bit of business called "Anything We Want," she brings that exact same raw, open wound affectation to sentimental lines like, "I kept touching my neck to guide your eye to where I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone."
At its lowest, The Idler Wheel is almost too emotionally blatant to stomach—thankfully, its prodigious melodic, rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities sweeten much of the heartache with melodic sugar. Easily her rawest, most immediate and misleadingly off-the-cuff effort yet, it refuses to be put on in the background, passing pleasantly through one ear and out the other. This is an album that tears open your chest, crushes your heart like a vise and finds spiritual catharsis amidst the bloody remains. "Don't let me ruin me," Fiona begs at one point. If any album this year could potentially "ruin" a human being inside and out, well, this is the one. Enjoy responsibly.
SumOlogy: Give it a few hard, serious listens and prepare to get your guts kicked around the block a few times.
Rating: A-
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Follow Brett Warner on Twitter: @Erasurehead
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