213. Fiona Apple, "The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do"

 

A while back, one of my Loyal Readers asked what albums on the list were new to me but I have since revisited.  Great question, and from now on my answer is THIS ALBUM.  Here's a weird thing: I don't really like avant-garde music, weird song structures, jazz, or show-tuney feeling stuff.

But I kinda LOVED this album, which has some of all of that stuff.  What gives?  It is unlike almost anything I generally "like" and listen to over and over but as soon as it was over I started it again and I've been dipping back into it regularly.  But it's so weird.  A lot of it is just Apple and piano, with some weird percussiony stuff in the background which, as it turns out, is often her using found objects like a pillow or (it sounds like to me) a paperback book - one big exception being the tympani she plays to thunderous effect on "Hot Knife," more on which later.  I was sometimes reminded of Carly Simon and Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, of course, but this is so sui generis it feels wrong to compare it to anything else.  

I think the key, as it so often is for me, is M-E-L-O-D-Y.  I have always been drawn to vocal melody in a song; it's maybe my favorite element, and given the sparseness of the arrangements here, Apple's melodies are front and the center of attention, sometimes the only thing, and they are BRILLIANT.  Right off the bat, in "Every Single Night," we get a very quiet, very simple piano, and Apple's gorgeous voice zooming and soaring around a complex and baroque melody, constantly surprising you with where it alights next.  "Periphery" has a more rolling, bouncy feel, with another killer melody, or maybe even a sequence of melodies, at least three I think.  In my notes for this album, by the song "Valentine," I just wrote "Melody!!  I love melody!" like I was in the throes of some Fiona Apple-induced nitrous high.

But my fave, and probably other people's too, is "Hot Knife," which got a Paul Thomas Anderson video:

Helps to have an Oscar-winning director as your bf, but that's not really the point here.  Can you see what I mean about the melody?  The piano part is actually secondary to the vocal (including the lovely backing vocals by Apple's sister Maude Maggart), which has the rapid-fire cadence of a playground chant or or a tribal ritual.  It's otherwordly and evocative of some kind of dream I never had.  The whole album is like that: incantory and disorienting and enticing.  And then the trap snaps shut.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I think so.