Can it really have been fifteen years since a tense, ponytailed Fiona Apple—mere days from officially exiting teendom—unaccountably ruffled mainstream media feathers by accepting her Best New Artist prize at the MTV Video Music Awards with the wholly reasonable declaration that celebrity culture is “bullshit”? Well, it can and it can’t. Apple’s slow-loris work ethic, resulting in a mere quartet of narratively unified albums, would imply a shorter burst of creativity in most artists—and her decision to burden the fourth of these with an inscrutable grad-school verse of a title, just as she did 1999’s sophomore set When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts… (no, I’m not going to look up the rest), suggests a kind of wilful rejection of maturity. The similarly ellipsis-fated The Idler Wheel… is, like all her work, speckled with striking, ornately affected lyrical turns of phrase that prove the title no red herring: devotees can pore over such admissions as “My ills are reticulate/My woes are granular” in the searing self-diagnosis “Left Alone,” while skeptics can justifiably wonder if even she knows what they mean. If nothing else—and it is plenty, plenty else—Fiona Apple’s fourth and most fine-cut album is triumphant evidence that precociousness is something even 34-year-old women needn’t grow out of.

Still, for every moment on Idler Wheel where Apple appears to be the same spiny, studiously unhappy headcase she ever was—“I’m a tulip in a cup/I stand no chance of growing up,” she even remarks of herself in the aching post-mortem love song “Valentine”—there’s another to remind us that, while a whole generation of angry young adults has been born since her 1996 debut, Tidal, she’s done some growing up herself. With apologies to Kirk van Houten, Fiona Apple could never be accused of borrowing a feeling, but where she once sounded possessed by alternating surges of rancor and longing, she’s wearily in possession of them here: they certainly haven’t gone away, and Idler Wheel is as acidly heartsore as anything Apple has recorded, but she knows herself better these days, and her songwriting is a little more creased for it. Crucially, the seven-year gap—the longest of her recording career—that followed 2005’s more controversially delayed Extraordinary Machine hasn’t arrested the inward direction of blame initiated on that album, as she takes ever more responsibility for her romantic and psychological shortfalls. The aforementioned “Left Alone,” arguably the centerpiece of the album, with its predatory piano line circling the trapeze-swing falsetto of her vocal, continues the work of 2005’s similarly faux-jaunty “Get Him Back” in calling herself out on her own barriers to intimacy: “How can I ask anyone to love me/When all I do is beg to be left alone?” she sighs resignedly. In 2012, Fiona Apple still thinks the world is bullshit; the difference is she can now admit she is too.

If that suggests Idler Wheel is a bleak or uninviting listen, it shouldn’t. Her increased capacity for self-recognition makes for her most blithely witty album to date, her confidence occasionally bubbling into untempered sensual joy. “Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key,” she acknowledges on “Werewolf,” playfully standing up for the solemn bulk of her oeuvre, but also wrong-footing us ahead of the album’s unexpectedly ecstatic finale, as the closing one-two of “Anything We Want” and “Hot Knife” find Apple luxuriating in unafraid, unironic amorousness. The latter is particularly startling, driving home its spare, inelegant carnal metaphor (“If I’m butter, then he’s a hot knife”) over layer upon layer of staggered vocals and airy-insistent tympany percussion, until a veritable phalanx of Fionas are pledging their devotion to a man miraculously capable of making the scowling songstress, in her words, “get feisty.” (One hopes he’s not the same poor bastard she damns for “the hot piss that comes from your mouth every time you address me” in the spitting, self-explanatory “Regret.” Don’t worry, she hasn’t gone entirely soft on us.)

So besotted is Apple with words and their permutations that it’s all too easy to zero in on her lyrics, but her thirtysomething calm—albeit of a passive-aggressive sort—is as evident in the musical construction of Idler Wheel as in its poetry. It’s perhaps the quietest album of her career, but also the most sonically disquieting, upending the beige conventions of all-acoustic instrumentation with eerie percussive textures and snatches of outer-world noise. These include the muffled industrial clatter that opens the magnificent maybe-breakup ballad “Jonathan,” its zithering background hum keeping the song nervily off-balance even as the more lushly wistful piano-led arrangement goes widescreen.

For an album of such tightly coiled, densely articulated feeling, the sheer extent of yawing aural space in Idler Wheel is quite remarkable: the final sound appears to be the happy, if disconcerting, medium she was trying to locate in the protracted recording and re-recording of Extraordinary Machine, where she wound up largely ditching longtime collaborator Jon Brion’s trademark carnivalesque Tin Pan Alley curlicues for the more muscled, abrasive pop beats of Eminem cohort Mike Elizondo. Unlike that outwardly hooky album, there’s precious little on the more shyly seductive Idler Wheel that sounds even notionally like a single, though conversely, the combination of its blue-moon timing and skew-whiff warmth has somehow landed the singer the first Top Five Album of her career on the US charts: you can, it seems, make people love you by playing hard to get. The 19-year-old Fiona Apple would doubtless be very pleased to hear that; what she’d make of her sad, frisky, lovely fourth album, a demonstration both of how much and how little she’s grown, is harder to determine.

Review by:
Guy Lodge