[Fetch The Bolt Cutters]

(greatest album of the decade released by a female)

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-...f-2010-2014/5/

Some albums become classic because everything ends up sounding like them. The Idler Wheel is getting there because in 2012 it sounded like nothing else, and it still doesn’t—it almost doesn’t sound like a Fiona Apple album. On a macro scale, you can sort of see what’s going on; The Idler Wheel is as if Apple extrapolated an entire album from the anxiety-tremor percussion of “Fast as You Can” and the tumbling logorrhea of “Not About Love”. You can trace individual songs to their antecedents if you try: “Regret” and “Valentine” are slow seethes of a kind with “Sullen Girl” and “Red Red Red”. “Left Alone” is “Get Him Back” as tragicomedy, turning calcified emotional deadness into sad-clown vaudeville; many songwriters attempt this theme and most make it gripping, but only Apple, with her cabaret background, would practically throw in jazz hands. But while the most outré moments on Apple’s previous albums were contained in tangents, The Idler Wheel is a whole album filled with them.

The Idler Wheel is so singular it confounds every narrative one can apply to it. “Hot Knife” and “Left Alone” are chokingly thick with sound, while tracks like “Periphery” owe a clear debt to Apple and Jon Brion’s lush, discarded first take of Extraordinary Machine. Critics that accused Apple of emotional overindulgence—musically or otherwise—clearly disregarded “Werewolf”, a breakup postmortem of which the most prudish of advice columnists would find disarmingly well-adjusted. Those dismissing her as a sulk definitely skipped the final two tracks, the latter of which, “Hot Knife”, hits the blood like a big Halloween-costume syringe of crushed-out dopamine; this far into Apple’s career and several years out, it still sounds like the first time she or anyone else processed falling in love.

When songwriters attain the “genius” tag—as Apple unquestionably has—they do it by sounding so resolutely them that every lyric is like they’re writing in their own private, untranslated language. The joy of relating to these songs is like figuring out the translation of a word or two, and Apple’s genius is in making found-sound idiosyncrasies sound like the rumblings that everyone’s got inside them. In making words and images nobody else would put together, the songs on The Idler Wheel sound like the most universal sentiments in the world.

slay it sis