Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine

The melody of “Extraordinary Machine” (the title track of Fiona Apple’s finally released third CD) is giddy: Bunnies hopping across a field. So is Fiona Apple’s voice, here a dusky dulcet, there a lithe falsetto, and yet always the perfect compliment to her music. She is that extraordinary machine: The type of carefree woman you’d expect to see splashing in puddles called music and at the same time, meticulous enough to isolate the one liquid chord able to send shivers up the spine. A musical prodigy, Fiona Apple knows enough about music to break most of the rules, flitting about with what can only be called mermaid fancy through a quicksilver sea of sound. In “Please Please Please,” she begs (playfully) for an end to melody and tries to escape from “what we know already/that will keep us steady...steady going nowhere.” Her solution is to experiment with the foundations of music, switching tempo, melody and voice with what could be called a mirror to our own erratic lives. These are abrupt shifts, yes, but never jarring; rather than resisting the mercurial flow of her own music, she immerses herself in this mishmash of melody. And far from swept away, she is radiant in this chaos, holding it all together by the skin of her tongue, the breath across her soft palette. Fresh, she sings, not steady: We have to allow ourselves to be carried away to get anywhere new. It’s in this fashion too that she’s able to make love songs fun again; although admittedly, with lyrics like “If I didn’t have to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill myself doing it/maybe I wouldn’t think so much of you,” this is a more modern love, the kind that unabashedly jabs at our flaws. Still, her wordplay (far exceeding that of any rapper and certainly more melodic) astounds. Each word elides, glides or jackhammers right into place, the perfect compliment for her keening sense of poetics. (“I’m either so sick in the head I need to be bled dry, to quit/or I just really used to love him/I sure hope that’s it.”) Yet for all her tinkering, Fiona Apple is never lost, and thanks to that, Extraordinary Machine gives us all the verve of life without once scrambling our nerve. [www.fiona-apple.com]