Hear Me Out: ‘The Idler Wheel…’ is still Fiona Apple’s best album to date
There’s not exactly a low point in Fiona Apple’s discography. The singer-songwriter set herself an incredibly high bar with her debut album Tidal at the age of 18, and hasn’t failed to reach it on every subsequent release. Part of this might be down to the amount of time she allows herself between albums, never looking to rush out the following album despite there being high demand for more music from her cultish fanbase. That said, it could be argued that people tend to forget about her in those interim periods and only hold her in high esteem when she’s just released her latest masterpiece.
However, Apple is on people’s minds again as we reach the mid-point of the decade and analyse the best releases of the past five years because people are revisiting her 2020 record that stopped virtually every music publication in its tracks – Fetch The Bolt Cutters. If it’s being touted as the album of the decade, then surely it’s her best album? Well, that accolade actually goes to its predecessor, The Idler Wheel…, the record that did everything that Fetch The Bolt Cutters attempted to do and more.
Whether or not you fully agree with their self-appointed slogan of being “the most trusted voice in music”, the influence of Pitchfork may have a lot to answer for the reason Fetch The Bolt Cutters is considered her magnum opus, having dished out the ultimate superlative in giving it a rare perfect ten very shortly after its release. It is hard to disagree with a lot of the points their glowing review gave, since it is an album of truly remarkable proportions, but the notion that “no music has ever sounded quite like it” simply isn’t true because the album that came eight years prior guns for the same artistic and poetic vision but achieves more with it.
Fetch The Bolt Cutters was praised for its minimalism, yet The Idler Wheel… is even more sparse in its arrangements, with every note reverberating in the emptiness of the room and allowing even the shortest moments of silence to carry just as much emotional impact as when music is being played. The makeshift percussion across the album is so understated, yet it often acts as the missing piece that completes certain songs. It delivers more in its brutal honesty as well, and regularly on the album it feels more like being alone in a room with a close friend unloading all of their problems on you as you listen and can’t help but tear up at their anguish.
With Fetch The Bolt Cutters arriving at the beginning of the pandemic, it resonated with a lot of people because of how it captured feelings of isolation and loneliness. Still, on The Idler Wheel… there’s an almost agoraphobic quality to several of the lyrics Apple delivers. The numbness felt in lines like “I just want to feel everything” in ‘Every Single Night’ plays well off the phrase “I don’t wanna talk about anything” she sings in ‘Jonathan’. It’s further echoed in ‘Left Alone’, a song where the chorus hammers home how long periods of intense sadness can culminate in a void being left where you’re physically unable to express any emotion at all.
While the more recent album focuses on serious subjects such as misogyny and sexual abuse, nothing on the record captures the same sense of pain felt across The Idler Wheel…’s ten tracks. Listen to the vigour with which Apple belts out the middle-eight in ‘Werewolf’ or the chorus in ‘Regret’ and tell me that you’re not shaken to your core by the torment which she tries so hard to let out.
The Idler Wheel… came as a surprise after seven years since Extraordinary Machine, an album often (wrongly) identified as her artistic slump. People had perhaps written her off and, due to the scarcity of new music from her, might have thought that she would never release another classic. But with The Idler Wheel… being as good as it was, expectations were always going to be high for the follow-up whenever it would arrive due to the fact she had proven she was still a force to be reckoned with. Its masterful showcase in songwriting is now, unfortunately, downplayed due to the acclaim received by Fetch The Bolt Cutters, and it’s a shame that Apple’s true masterpiece probably won’t get the flowers it deserves.
