FIONA APPLE at Sound Academy, July 4. Rating: NNNN
A Fiona Apple concert during a stifling July heatwave is good for mourning whatever it is you need to mourn – love, death, bad habits, a minor day job injustice.
Some die-hards in the audience swig overpriced alcohol and sweat – a few so immobilized by Fiona-past that her two-week old release The Idler Wheel… hasn’t figured on their radar. Others watch the live-feed on Sound Academy’s patio, chain-smoking in the weak breeze under a harvest moon.
Brooding is the calling card of Fiona fans and so, whether you want it or not – whether she cares or not – she’s here to conduct group catharsis.
Apple, slippery and brittle-boned, in a gaudy purple skirt, matching scarf and eyeshadow, skips onto the stage behind her five band members.
She spends much of the night at centre-stage, arms folded behind her back when they aren’t flailing in time, or sitting at a grand piano off to the side.
She speaks to the crowd just once, to introduce the final song and seems blithely unaware, but not dismissive, of the gathered flock that is hinged on every briny yelp and flinch of a sinewy limb. This is the formidable power of Fiona and her inherently selfish art without even a glance, she resonates.
Despite touring in support of a new record the set list is a loopy, best-of cabaret touching on her four releases. And so you are brought back to memorizing songs like Fast As You Can or Shadowboxer or Get Gone. They are not unrecognizable arrangements just smokier, elevated by wanton guitar solos and lingering crests of noise on the songs where it’s not just her, piano and percussion.
Sleep To Dream, which she accompanies with a jittery jig, feels funkier and Extraordinary Machine brighter. The new songs – Anything We Want, Daredevil, Werewolf, and Every Single Night – are fuller than Idler Wheel’s sparse piano-and-drums layout. It’s evident that these songs also more melancholy in that older-wiser way than her previous work, because they play less freewheeling and more focused.
Apple is a Higgs field, giving every note, every syllable and semantic twist weight by virtue of a voice that’s always been older and wearier than its corporeal source.
Sixteen years after the slinky cri de coeur of Criminal, the voice unapologetically shows its age too. It’s flinty and dramatically tremulous with an innate harmoniousness that only wavers when she sings so hard you can see her bicep veins pop out from 15 rows back.
And the masochistic brooders rejoice.
