[Review] Coldplay Support: Fiona Apple

Years of silence have hardly dulled Fiona Apple's intensity. She's back, wielding it like a sharp knife.

Remember Fiona Apple? She was the sulky teenager with the big watery blue eyes who condemned the music industry for being shallow while she made scintillating videos that showed her romping around in her panties. She railed against ex-boyfriends and the Butterball turkey people with equal venom, and spoke openly about being raped at age 12. Following the 1999 release of her second album, "When the Pawn..." (the full title stretched out over 90 words), she famously stalked off stage in the middle of a New York concert, shedding tears and physically threatening journalists.

How could you forget her?

On Friday, the Grammy-winning singer returned to the Warfield after years of self-imposed exile. With a strong new album, "Extraordinary Machine," and a promising 13-city tour to promote it -- with further dates penciled in with Coldplay early next year -- it seems as if she's worked out her demons.Almost.

Apple, now 28, still looks like she could flip out at any moment. When she isn't sipping tea behind an enormous piano, she stands in the spotlight with her shoulders stiff, eyes locked on some ghost on the horizon, knees twitching gawkily in time to the rhythms. Her knuckles look red and swollen as if she has just been punching the walls backstage. The new songs from "Extraordinary Machine," her third album, are especially intense. Which is to say they sound even more thunderous and emotionally ravaged than Apple's older tunes like "Limp" (lyrical kicker: "It won't be long till you'll be lying limp in your own hand") and "Sleep To Dream" ("I got my own hell to raise"), one of the few tracks she pulled from her triple-platinum 1996 debut album, "Tidal." She introduced the barbed "Oh Well" by announcing, "Boy, was I having a bad day when this song was written." Is it merely a coincidence that her ex-boyfriends like magician David Blaine and director Paul Thomas Anderson have all but disappeared?

The studio version of "Extraordinary Machine," which sparked a death-row-pardon-style campaign with the Web site www.freefiona.com when rumors floated that her record label, Sony, had refused to put it out, sounds a bit like kooky carnival music. But live -- backed by five bearded session players, no less than two on keyboards -- Apple is able to get to the, er, core of songs like "O' Sailor" and the hip-hop inflected "Red Red Red." She stomps her feet and scrunches her face up with each bitter sentiment, occupying it with every atom in her body.

There's a thrilling sense that we're all headed for revelation together. Not only does she make it through the entire 90-minute set and belt out an acoustic version of the album's title track during an encore, but for just a brief second, it actually looks like Apple might be trying to fight back a smile.

Source: here