Extraordinary Machine
After a six-year official silence and turmoil surrounding the making of this album — she ultimately re-recorded it with a second producer, hip-hop specialist Mike Elizondo, taking over from Jon Brion — it\'s a pleasure and a surprise to find that *Extraordinary Machine* is ultimately Fiona Apple\'s best work yet. The arty textures of her previous work with Brion are hardly gone; the real news here is the charm and wry humor that now often accompany the singer/songwriter\'s musings about life and love. (\"It ended bad, but I love what we started\" is only one of a row of striking observations in \"Parting Gift.\") There are also powerful currents roiling beneath all this; she ends up smashing a (figurative?) \"Window\" rather than \"him, or her, or me.\" Whether she intended to or not, Apple has raised the bar for everyone else with this work.
Check out our album review of Artist's Extraordinary Machine on Rolling Stone.com.
It turns out that all the conspiracy theories and rumors surrounding Fiona Apple’s long-delayed third album were only half-truths.