by Lichfield1979

Created on: November 16, 2008

Fiona Apple - Tidal

Accomplished debut album from the then nineteen-year-old singer, writer and pianist, although her musicianship may have outstripped her songs at this nascent stage of her career. MTV awarded her their award for best new artist in 1997 and she won a Grammy the following year for best female rock vocal performance. Rolling Stone readers also considered "Criminal" to be the best song of 1997. Her penchant for angry tirades subsequently led to a media backlash. In 2008, another American magazine, Entertainment Weekly, reckoned Tidal was the twentieth best album since 1983, and in 2005 Blender deemed "Criminal" the seventy-first best song since 1980.

Track One - Sleep To Dream

The deep vocal is surly and defiant and the drumbeat echoes murkily - perhaps as though underwater - whilst the piano glimmers and dapples through the trees. The song moodily wrestles with deception, pity and pride, and ultimately views love as a confrontation. Producer Jon Brion contributes guitars and vibraphone, and there is also a chamberlain to accompany bass and drums.

Track Two - Sullen Girl

A slow, jazz-tinged piano ballad, with a sweetly haunted melody, sparkling sparingly amidst the broody accompaniment, which also includes optigan, pedal steel guitar, vibraphone, chamberlain, dulcitone and marimba.

Track Three - Shadowboxer

The rhythm section sets up a slow and steady waltz underneath the piano chords. There's also a percussive tack piano, and a swelling string-like spookiness conjured up around the margins, presumably with the vibraphone and the chamberlain again. Apple sings about the games played on the boundaries between love and friendship.

Track Four - Criminal

The most well known song on the album, which was promoted with an accompanying music video that featured Apple looking suspiciously undressed, and this after she had been publicly critical of such conceits. The intention was presumably some sort of knowing commentary on the exploitation of teenage jailbait in the MTV age - although it was left to The New Yorker magazine to point out years afterwards that she had resembled nothing else as much as "an underfed Calvin Klein model". Nonetheless it picked up some awards, as Apple claimed the song was about "feeling bad for getting something so easily by using your sexuality." Fortunately the musical merit of the song is beyond reproach, even if the opening come-on is "I've been a bad, bad girl." The rhythmic and percussive arrangement is probably the closest Tidal

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