Fiona Apple took another 6+ years to get out a full length record. A follow up to what I considered her masterpiece, Extraordinary Machine. (Although admittedly, I was a bigger fan of the unreleased online version). A good year of this delay was record-company based. (Time to get off the majors, Fiona).Fiona turns away from longtime collaborator Jon Brion on this one and worked mostly with her drummer. And maybe that's the key difference in this album's direction. The lush orchestration of EM (especially the online version) has been traded for pared-down piano-vocal with rhythm accompaniment. Sometimes with jazzy results. Very little else included. Not a bad thing, just a difference.
Of course, I'm a words man and Fiona has never been a stranger to spinning a yarn. She seems to have a bottomless notebook of different ways to express disappointment and anger. Another difference with "Idler..." is that quite often, we see Fiona turning the sword on herself. Her lyrics describe a tone of insecurity and self-sabotage in a way that she hasn't explored a lot before.
"While you were watching someone else, I stared at you and cut myself"
"How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?"
Don't worry though, she still tears into the occasional John. "Regret" is easily the most biting with its chorus: "I ran out of white doves' feathers to soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth".
And then, after eight songs of ire, she gets downright sexy for the album's two closers. "Anything We Want" seduces with "I kept touching my neck to guide your eye to where I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone". And then on "Hot Knife", Fiona channels Gene Simmons while presenting a rhythmic lyric in the round that repeats to the climax.
I feel like I should complete this review with a Fiona-album-title-size poem. But that would take me six years. (5 of 5 stars)
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