“I just want to feel everything,” sings Fiona Apple in “Every Single Night,” the lead track and first single on her fourth album, which, just like her second one, comes bearing a title so ridiculous it dares you to dismiss her. She’s got the problem that afflicts sensitive folks; that of piercing awareness. But instead of running from it, she repeats those words like a mantra to help her endure the pain that comes with perception, truth, love and all those other difficult things that make life worth living. And while she’s doing that, she lets us know what the rest of the album is like: There’s Apple’s piano, her voice (sometimes overdubbed), a celeste, some percussion, a sound effect or two, and not much else.

But there’s a lot of Apple here. Throughout The Idler Wheel, she’s front and center so simply that the starkness feels almost avant-garde. As she admits on that first cut, she’s fighting with her brain and there is no referee — just Apple, her drummer/co-producer Charley Drayton, and generous doses of silence between notes. Nothing comes between her and us. This is the polar opposite of all those claustrophobic, super-compressed, “loudness wars” records, and the… read more »