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| Clean Slate · Epic | discogs.com |
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"I ran out of white doves' feathers /
To soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth /
Every time you address me"
To soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth /
Every time you address me"
In a departure from the sedate smoothness of her previous repertoire, Fiona Apple's most recent album displays the kind of crass lucidity that comes with one too many glasses of merlot. Loose and lolloping, The Idler Wheel... feels like it was not so much written as scribbled.
Crafting a percussion section from ambient noise is a time-honoured tradition in musical films, a shorthand for shifting from some semblance of reality to imagined or hallucinated musical numbers. In Lars von Trier's bleak 2000 drama Dancer In the Dark, the fanciful Selma (as played by the incomparable Björk) mentally choreographs flashy setpieces to distract herself from her dead-end blue-collar job and her impending blindness. The rumbling of trains and the clattering of industrial equipment are but two of the many palettes from which Björk composed the uniquely bizarre musical. The counterpoint between the bouncing of basketballs and the squeaking of sneakers is used to great effect in High School Musical when mop-haired jock Troy Bolton, to the chagrin of his teammates, expounds on the conflict between focusing on his sporting career and his role in the eponymous production.
The Idler Wheel... scrapes its feet along gravel, crashes pots and pans together, and for good measure throws in a literal kitchen sink.
Apple's skills as a pianist continue to impress. She jangles her way through haphazard chromatic shifts and muddy harmonisations, all the while maintaining a sense of direction and cohesion. One may be forgiven for assuming this album is an impromptu one-take recording, live in Apple's apartment in the small hours of the morning, but upon closer inspection a deft and precise artist is at work. It takes a great deal of talent to sound this effortless.
To clarify, this effortlessness applies only to the songwriting. Much effort has gone into the actual playing of instruments, not least of which is Apple's thick, hearty voice — she forces out each word with visceral intensity, tearing her very throat when she must.
Listening to The Idler Wheel... is a brutal, physical commitment not to be taken lightly.