To Rave About: The Idler Wheel...

To Rave About is a series of posts about things you might have missed that the author of this blog thinks is worth your time to check out. Movies, music, tv shows, restaurants, and other non-current items worth checking out end up here, and are of course presented in a review-ish manner.

Released: June 2012

Like her When The Pawn Hits the Conflict..., Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do is in need of a shorter moniker, which, for all intents and purposes, is abbreviated to The Idler Wheel... by the media. This album has been in the works since 2008 or 2009 according to Fiona Apple and was recorded without the knowledge of her label.

It then went on to sell 72,000 copies on its first week and continues to top year-ender lists. Released in June 2012, the 10-track effort wouldn't give you any clue that it took 4 years to craft given how raw it sounds.

There's a certain rawness in The Idler Wheel  that captures my imagination. Fiona Apple's closest pal in my book, Regina Spektor, does not even come close to what she managed to achieve with The Idler Wheel.... Unlike her previous efforts, Fiona Apple puts a decidedly alternative sound to her 4th studio album, using raw vocals paired well with the emotions she's trying to paint a picture of, and sparse backing instruments for a fresher more subdued sound. Unlike Spektor, who manages to insert a laugh-out-loud line in the middle of a cry-your-heart-out track, Fiona Apple has decidedly stuck her sound to acrid bitterness and grit, occasionally injecting dark humor here and there that would make you grin but not laugh. The result in this work is often intense, gripping, and emotionally absorptive. It doesn't invite you to feel with her, but her songs are a narrative to a soul who has had it hard, perhaps from being different. She deviates at times, though, or at the very least, once, in the whole of The Idler Wheel and the resulting track is more revelatory than any of her work in years.

Why you should give it a listen: It's an important work from one of the most unique artists of our time. To call it her magnum opus would be debatable, but it wouldn't be wrong either. It wouldn't work for highly commercial ears--except perhaps for the top track Hot Knife--but a listen or two to the whole body of work would get you plugged in and absorbed.

Recommended Tracks:

Hot Knife - Fiona Apple uses sparse instruments in this production: namely a single timpani (?) booming a single repeated pattern and some interspersed piano now and then. The bare vocals refers to Fiona Apple being a butter and her lover a hot knife. Or vice versa. By the end of the track, Hot Knife has four choruses sang on top of each other, building up and collecting over its running time. At the end, all choruses are sung together at once, producing an orgasmic harmony of 4 overlapping choruses. It's the closest Fiona Apple gets to being pop. And non-suicidal fun.


Valentine - In Valentine, Fiona Apple paints herself in dreary metaphors on lilting piano chords: she's a tulip in a cup, cut off by her former lover and that she has no bitterness whatsoever. But her subsequent singing suggests sarcasm, particularly in the lines, "You, you, you, you..." as though she's saying that her lover is too self-important. Notable are her rasps and an evident bitterness on her voice here. If anything, Valentine maybe the most depressing song in Idler Wheel, telling a story of letting go and wishing the best for your former lover in a manner that Adele will envy.

Periphery - "Ohhhhhh, the Periphery," Fiona Apple sings about a bar or a place where (possibly in her opinion) unimportant people go and throw great parties. Having lost another lover to the Periphery, she sings a song of sour-graping claiming "all that loving must have been lacking something, if I got bored, trying to figure you out." Possibly Fiona Apple's quirkiest song in the album.

Anything We Want - Things go for darker in Anything We Want. Fiona Apple sings of quirky pictures that lead to kissing in private then doing anything they want. The pictures suggest quirkiness (for instance, she sings "I look like a neon zebra shaking rain off her stripes" or "I'll draw on the wall and you can play UFC rookie") but the singing voice she uses suggests a a primal, darker side to the desires drawn in the verses. The energy in the song is low and suggests depression, but is nonetheless a good listen. This track perhaps may be the most produced track in Idler Wheel but nonetheless still sounds subdued and raw.

Werewolf - The disaster metaphor-filled Werewolf is backed by relaxed piano chords and a positive disposition--an irony in the works. The ode to incompatible lovers goes for the awry when we here screams added to the track (reminiscent to those in the film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, where Ezra Miller locks his high school gym and starts shooting everyone with arrows). The effect is a bit mixed but the writing is strong, evident in the lines, "I can liken you to a werewolf the way you left me for dead, but I admit to have provided the full moon." and "We're like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity." It then goes for the ultimate irony (or sarcasm) by claiming "but can still support each other, all we gotta do's avoid each other" a bad rhyme that it makes up for by singing "nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key."