Today
Fiona Apple’s
The Idler Wheel … was released. The first time I spun the album my jaw dropped. I grew up listening to Fiona Apple. She was one of my favorite artists in high school, and I’d followed her since the
Tidal days, through her more “mature” albums
When the Pawn … and
Extraordinary Machine. I’d always still liked her, but my fervor had subsided a bit since those awkward teen years when her brand of super-confessional experimental pop really hit home. Well, this is something wholly different. As great as her previous three albums were,
The Idler Wheel is the gutsiest thing she’s put out yet. Even more so than on
Extraordinary Machine, Apple sounds uninterested in storming the radio with
The Idler Wheel. She’s after something bigger here. Lyrically, she exposes her greatest wounds and digs at them with extraordinary candor and self-directed venom. “I root for you, I love you, you you you you” she sings on one of her lovelier tunes, “Valentine,” but even then, that devotion has a desperate tone that makes it hard to take at face value. Similarly, on “Jonathan,” lines like “I like watching you live” are accompanied by a fairly dissonant arrangement, deranged drumwork by collaborator Charlie Drayton and musique concrète that makes the whole thing sound like a ship coming apart. Vocally, Apple has never sounded stronger, scarier and more assured, frequently unleashing shiver-inducing cries, growling and singing with unchained vibrato within the same breaths, on songs like the searing “Left Alone.” And just when things get too grim, she closes the album with a jazzy, sexy ode to a guy who cuts through her like a “hot knife.” From start to finish, across its jagged edges and soaring heights,
Idler Wheel is an exhilarating, simply astonishing listen.
I’m a big fan of garage rock but not necessarily of its sometimes limiting factors — guitars and vocals have to have just enough care balanced with slop, that sort of thing. So it’s nice to hear a couple of great up-and-coming albums from bands who subscribe to garage rock aesthetics but not “surf rock fun times” generic modes.
King Tuff’s
self-titled album is a real riot, from its opening track “Anthem,” which delivers perfectly delivered riffery the likes of which is pretty rare these days. Along with like-minded peers
Ty Segall and the late
Jay Reatard, King Tuff write songs first and foremost, and the ground covered here becomes more apparent upon repeat listens, which isn’t hard to do with an album that’s this much fun to listen to. “Alone & Stoned” has terrific ascendant vocal lines and a cool ’80s vibe under its garage veneer. “Unusual World” is a touching garage ballad that doesn’t shy away from varying its instrumentation, with synths and vibes adding nice touches to Tuff’s
Marc Bolan-esque delivery. What I’m most taken with on
King Tuff is that it delivers catchy garage pop tunes while refusing to adhere to one tempo and one sound like so many albums of a similar ilk. My personal favorite: the
Vaselines-ish “Stupid Superstar.”
Along those same lines, I really can’t get enough of
Grass Widow’s
Internal Logic. Starting off with its lo-fi sci-fi opener “Goldilocks Zone,”
Internal Logic is a perfect example of a band perfectly executing a much-missed particular sound while adding its own peculiar flair of cool nerdy girl chic. Not to be limiting, but the album in some ways plays like a master class in post-punk girl bands: the multiple harmonic voices of
Stereolab; the out-of-step tempos of
Kleenex and
ESG and their progeny, like
Erase Errata and
Electrelane; and off-kilter charm of bands like
The Breeders. Fun and clever without biting off more than it can chew,
Internal Logic pretty much leaves me with a smile on my face from start to finish.
Last but not least, I hope the new
Liars album doesn’t get lost in the shuffle ‘cause
WIXIW is every bit as good as their previous few releases, in my mind. Thought it doesn’t quite reach the heights of
Drum’s Not Dead, I’m digging this new, quieter yet just as paranoid edition of Liars.
WIXIW is pop in the way the
Silver Apples or
Portishead’s
Third are pop, equal parts sinister and beautiful, with a throbbing heart underneath its digital beats. “Octagon” is disturbing, atonal at parts, yet its whole is instantly memorable, sticking mean hooks into you that feel better than they should. “No. 1 Against the Rush” sends goth down the autobahn, playing out like a krautrock variation on
The Cure’s “A Forest.”
WIXIW has been compared to
Radiohead’s
Kid A, and, listening to the title track — which disintegrates eerily under waves of oscillators and comes pulsing back for a haunting chanted chorus — it’s not hard to see why.
As you may have already heard, 
