When you run a tiny rock website, you don't get much in the way of pre-releases or anything else. I could write an album about it and so could Fiona Apple, who has made a career of personal problems by way of hardcore art-rock pop songs.

So anyway, NPR are streaming Fiona's first album in seven years, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do., and it is really not bad as these things go,

I am not a huge fan, being too given to pursuing the hook for my listening pleasure to get into piano based art tracks that seem to keep on stabbing themselves in the eye. I'll take "Please Please Please" and "Extraordinary Machine" and then it depends purely if I'm in the mood and right now I'm in the mood.

It starts terrific, "Every Single Night" -which I hated as a single and love as a leadoff song and "Daredevil" which is pretty excellent getting fucked in the middle of the night song, and then gets weirder. But I've always liked her lyric if not her sense of melody and on these extremely heavy tracks she sings these disturbing numbers with tremendous heart taking us from a whisper to a scream just like that. 

The drumming is excellent and the piano playing not bad, the ten songs add up to another part of her twinning love life melodrama personified and I bet a great many girls everywhere are digging this teenage kicked all grown up. Me? I've always thought Apple is the sorta girl that has any right thinking man cowering under the bed and her pretty naff live performance the one time I saw her (2005?) convinced me that she is too solipsist to ever give of herself enough to let us in. By the last song,  with its tribal drums telling her desire through the grapevine, and a chorus of Fiona's "If I'm the butter than he's the hot knife", you just wanna spread em.

Grade: B+