CD of The Week

Fiona Apple</font></strong><font size="2">'s biggest strength as an artist has always been her sincerity. Even when the production behind her songs was at it most ornate (or meretricious in the case of 2005's Extraordinary Machine), the words that anchored them conveyed a sense of emotional nakedness and necessity. She was singing these songs and telling these stories because she had to. With The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (amazingly only the second-longest title in her discography), Apple's arrangements finally match her words' sparseness and rawness.

Self-produced with help from her drummer Charley Drayton, The Idler Wheel forgoes the flourishes that previously bolstered and bogged down her pop charms in favor of lighter, looser acoustic piano and percussion, approaching an experimental jazz-rock elegance that hasn't been perfected to this degree since the peak days of Joni Mitchell. Apple's vocals also take wilder, less comforting turns this time around, often lowering into guttural, even atonal registers that match her playful, deceptively blunt words. Early highlight "Daredevil" exemplifies this best as she menacingly pleads "Don't let me ruin me. I MAY NEED A CHAPERONE!"

Fiona fans looking for another "Criminal" or "Fast as You Can" may be disappointed initially. This album offers no easy gateways, though there are plenty of future classics. "Left Alone" offers one of her starkest, most haunting epiphanies yet in "How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?" A telling sentiment given this album follows her longest hibernation from the limelight yet. That harrowing honesty throughout makes the closing couplet of songs standout even more as both pleasant surprise and upswing in mood. "Anything We Want," a shuffling first person ode to young love arguably sees Apple at her happiest (?!) on record, while the final almost acapella "Hot Knife" weaves an amusingly lusty kitchen metaphor through what a tribe of chanting copies of the singer.

More so than her past efforts, Fiona Apple's latest showcases her talents at their purest and least decorated. It's ironic that an album with so many words in the title can succeed so much with the less is more approach, but Fiona is no stranger to contradictions. After all, this particular Idler Wheel shows that her own will likely never stop turning.