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Fiona Apple, “Tidal”

By admin_mike In

Fiona Apple, Tidal, released 1996 by The Work Group

1) Sleep To Dream
2) Sullen Girl
3) Shadowboxer
4) Criminal
5) Slow Like Honey
6) The First Taste
7) Never Is A Promise
8) The Child Is Gone
9) Pale September
10) Carrion

Fiona Apple is a purveyor of piano-based bluesy rock, or maybe rocky R&B. She’s got a great husky alto voice, and her songs have some lovely dissonances and surprising and neat harmonic twists; a strong sense of rhythm and funk permeates her music.

But her vibrato sounds kind of weird and tentative, and her voice is untrained and occasionally a bit off – not to mention that it lacks the richness to sustain long notes without sounding a little thin and flat. If she has decent piano chops, her writing doesn’t showcase it, as her piano parts are generally just chords or arpeggios, so her songs tend to kind of blend together because of the sameness of their arrangements and rhythmic feel.

That said, there’s a fair amount of promise here. Tidal actually starts quite impressively, as the opening track “Sleep To Dream” begins with just a sparse drumbeat and Apple singing a deliciously tonally ambiguous melody that lands satisfyingly once the accompaniment joins in to anchor it. “Criminal” is a catchy and cool tune. And the last song on the disc, “Carrion” is noteworthy for the way it keeps flicking back and forth between tempi.

My criticisms sound a lot harsher than I intend – it’s an OK album, that I don’t mind listening to. But it’s a CD that’s more about potential than fulfillment; a nice enough debut, but with room and necessity for growth.