A full six years after clogging review pages with a 90-word album title, Fiona Apple still manages to be difficult. As the story goes, Extraordinary Machine was recorded back in 2003, but stalled due to her own dissatisfaction with the Jon Brion-produced material and her record label’s balking at the lack of a potential hit single. Fearing Sony would pull the plug on the project entirely, Apple shelved the album and disappeared from the public eye.
Ultimately, it was the still-dubious Internet leak of her Brion tracks that generated the buzz to lead Apple (and Sony) to invest in finishing the project. Fast forward two years, and we have Extraordinary Machine, produced not by Brion, but now by Dr. Dre collaborator Mike Elizondo. The result? The album still lacks a potential hit (lead single “Parting Gift” is somehow both dull and jarring). The delay, however, was not in vain; Elizondo’s production trades Brion’s orchestrations for dense, aggressive piano-driven melodies that match Machine’s confrontational lyrics and keep Apple’s music both dynamic and (usually) interesting. For all their sparse intimacy, the two remaining Brion cuts — the quirky title track and airy “Waltz” — feel overly theatrical. When these tracks are contrasted with reworked gems such as the hip-hop influenced “Tymps,” the years of trouble seem, incredibly, worthwhile.
