Customer Reviews

When The Pawn...

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1 star:		(9)

 

 

Does anybody recall the nod to Fiona Apple from the Cartoon Network? Fred (the boring, straight guy of Scooby Doo) complains: "Velma, you little traitor... You can forget about the Fiona Apple tickets, little Miss Matchmaker, I mean it!" For solely this reason do I hope for Fiona's success. I'd hate that classic line to be outdated!

Fiona Apple is pissed off! And that passion comes through loud and clear on tracks like Limp and Get Gone. While most songwriters struggle to be melodic, eloquent, even coherant in their anger and angst, Apple plays these emotions as well as she does her piano.

On the whole this is slightly better than her first album, more exciting and rhythmically interesting, though there are few tracks as good as Tidal's Sullen Girl or Shadowboxer. If you've never bought this because you were afraid it wouldn't live up to Tidal, fear not. Just because none of the songs got that much airplay doesn't mean a thing. This is definitely no sophomore slump. All I want to know is when Apple will release a third album. She is easily one of the most gifted and exciting musicians working today, and a far cry from all the manufactured pop princesses like Britney, Christina, Jessica, Mandy, Hillary and the like. Fiona Apple is above all, writing from her gut and singing from the heart. Don't miss out, buy this today.

Fiona Apple rose to notoriaty with her 1996 debut album "Tidal" (released when she was all of 19 years old), and then took 3 1/2 years to release her second album in November, 1999. It was well worth the wait, and the album sounds as good now as it then, if not better.

"When the Pawn" (10 tracks, 42 min.) delivers on the promise of "Tidal" and then some! From the excellent opener "On the Pound", Fiona delivers one standout track after another, and shows how much her songwriting has matured from "Tidal". Although her music is very different from Tori Amos, spiritually they are both on the same page. I can't help but notice, though, that Matt Chamberlain, drummer and side-kick for Tori's albums, drums on most tracks here too. If one has to pick out standout tracks in the album (there are no weak tracks truly), I will pick the angry "Limp", the enthralling "Fast As You Can", and the pensive "The Way Things Are".

One thing that stands out is how much Fiona's lyrics have improved from her debut album. This despite the ridiculous album's full title (which is a 90 word poet). It's been more than 4 years since "When the Pawn" was released, but supposedly a new album is in the works for later this year. "When the Pawn" was released in late 99 and I called it one of the best of 2000 (see my annual "best of" lists) simply because I felt its impact wasn't felt until then. It still resonates with me now as it did then. Just magnificent!

I impulsively bought this CD after having listened to Tidal over and over. I had heard "Fast as you Can" and "Limp" back when teen pop was all the rage, but they didn't make me want to go buy the album itself. Then again, I did buy the Pokemon soundtrack, so what did I know? Not a lot, since this CD is worth every penny in its price.

This album is great in every sense of the word. I don't regret buying this album for one second. This is the kind of album that doesn't draw comparisons to other artists. It makes other artists be compared to you, and it's the kind of album every artist dreams of making.

Fiona sounds like she's been doing this for years. Not only was she very young, but it would have been easy for her to give in and make the kind of pop music that was big at the time. She didn't and for that alone she deserves credit.

1)On the Bound: a great album opener. One of my favorite songs on the album.
2)To Your Love: a really good song. Very uptempo and fast.

3)Limp: another one of my favorites. This song is fierce and it makes you afraid to be the man who inspired this song.
4)Love Ridden: a slower song. It keeps the momentum going.
5)Paper Bag: a strange and very good song.
6)A Mistake: probably my favorite song on the album. Very honest and unique.
7)Fast As You Can: I love this song. I love the changes it makes tempo-wise.
8)The Way Things Are: another one of my favorites. She really nails this song.
9)Get Gone: I love the chorus. This has some of her most clever lyrics.
10)I Know: a great way to end a great album. Very slow and reflective.

So there you have it. I highly recommend this CD. Hopefully, her next album will be out soon. It will be hard to follow up this album, but I know Fiona can do it.

No matter what you think of Fiona as a person (she is quite eccentric in more ways than one) it is undeniable what kind of talent she has. Her music is like liquid poetry, each word and note sliding right into the next one, not as if it was written that way, by destined to be so. Her voice is thick, and sultry, filled with the heaviness of regret and pain that far exceeds her age.

Her metaphors are amazingly clever and powerful and yet so easy to understand. Her use of rhyme, puns and alliteration get me every time. Lines like "my pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will dispprove your faith in man" hits a spike with each consinant. "You can use my skin to bury secrets in" manages to sound both sensual and creepy. She seems to know herself so well and has no problem letting us know the truth.

If you enjoyed "Tidal", there would have to be something terribly wrong with you to not like "When the Pawn..." just as much, if not moreso. I just hope that she continues the trend of each album blowing the former out of the water (if her label ever actually lets her release Extrodinary Machine)!

this cd, along with TIDAL are 2 of my favorite cd's of all time... i won't be long, but i will say this much...GET THE DOUBLE CD DEAL.... IF YOU DON'T HAVE THESE CD'S ... YOU ARE LOST IN A WORLD FULL OF LIFELESS MUSIC....

When I first heard "When the Pawn...", I have to admit that I didn't like it very much. It wasn't so much that I didn't like the songs; this album is just so completely opposite of "Tidal" that it intimidated me a little bit. On a few more listens, I ended up enjoying this one the most. I listen to it on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.

Things get started with "On the Bound", "To Your Love", and "Limp", three angry, driving, and powerful songs. "To Your Love" contains some of my favorite lyrics of Fiona's - "My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon around you/But by the time I'm close to you, I lose my desideratum and now you/So now you have it". "Limp", I would say, is the best of the three. The verses are soft and crescendo louder and more aggressive into the chorus where Fiona proclaims: "Call me crazy/hold me down/make me cry/get off now baby/it won't be long till you'll be lying limp in your own hands".

The fourth track, "Love Ridden" is a quiet, calm love ballad, a drastic change from the album's beginning. But even in the ballads of this album, a little bit of anger always comes out. After the first chorus, she sings bitterly "My hand won't hold you down no more/the path is clear to follow through". After this is "Paper Bag", one of my favorites. Even with it's anti-love lyrics, it still manages to sound uplifting with its quirky music and the bounce in Fiona's voice. This song is probably one of the best, lyrically, on the album. "And I went crazy again today/looking for a strand to climb/looking for a little hope/Baby said he couldn't stay/wouldn't put his lips to mine/and a fail to kiss is a fail to cope".

"A Mistake" and "Fast as you Can" go back towards the original anger of the first few tracks. "Fast as you Can" was the first single released and changes tempos drastically and suddenly. She almost talks through the verses and chorus which are very fast-paced until suddenly, it turns into a smooth, drawn-out, jazzy feel, then back into it's frantic pace. "The Way Things Are" is probably my least favorite. A lot of people I've talked to say it's one of the best, but it just doesn't grab me as much as the others.

"Get Gone" is a bitter mid-tempo track. The quiet verses turn into strong choruses in which Fiona sings confidently "I do know what's good for me/and I've done what I could for you/but you're not benefiting/instead I'm sitting singing again". "I Know" is my favorite and is last on the album, but definitely not least. It is a beautiful ballad and as she says, probably the closest to a happy ending her songs will ever get. At one point, she proclaims angrily "Baby I can't help you out/while she's still around" but by the end with the hope for everything to work out, says "If it gets too late for me to wait/for you to find you love me and tell me so/it's ok/don't need to say it". This album is even better than "Tidal" and definitely deserves your attention.

Combining an alluringly smoky voice with sparky lyrics that hit their target every time, Fiona Apple has plenty of evident talent, and _When the Pawn_ showcases it brilliantly. Backed by musical arrangements ranging from smooth to catchy to quirky, Apple gives us here a collection of songs filled with dry, self-deprecating wit, spot-on observations and a striking emotional honesty. There's a precisely-worded insight into human weaknesses that's reminiscent of a less self-conscious (and self-consciously political) Ani Difranco. And in 'Limp' she provides the best Angry Young Woman song ever, both stirring and bitingly funny. Fabulous.

"I'm gonna make a mistake, I'm gonna do it on purpose," murmurs Fiona Apple just over halfway into her sophomore release, "When the Pawn...," an album equal in the chances it takes and the success that it has. She's right: the album is a giant mistake. 1999, the year that saw the album's release, was supposed to be a year off for solo songstresses; Alanis was in her awkward unplugged stage between "Thank U"'s full-frontal video and a new album to come in 2002, Madonna was still reaping success from "Ray of Light," her reintroduction into pop culture, Shania was about to hit it huge with 1997's "Come on Over," Jewel put out a label-pleasing Christmas album, Natalie Imbruglia was living large overseas off of her revamping of Ednaswap's "Torn," Sheryl Crow's "Globe Sessions" fame had died down, and Paula Cole and Meredith Brooks put out two career-devastating albums on the same date, "Amen" and "Deconstruction." Hell, the most successful female of '99 was Erykah Baduh, and that was only because she crooned the acoustic-soul refrain of the Roots' "You Got Me." On top of all this, Fiona Apple was not supposed to save female rock 'n roll. She had become famous off of the thriller "Criminal," which could be attributed solely to its just-short-of-soft-core-porn video. So on November 9th, 1999, "When the Pawn..." hit the shelves, the biggest f*ck-up in the history of female music. But after a listen, the album can easily be described by another Fiona-penned lyric: "I'm always doing what I think I should, almost always doing everybody good."

The goodness kicks off with "On Your Bound," almost a "Criminal" rewrite due to its recycling of pounding piano chords and shy carnival flutes. This song really gives light into Fiona's ability to stun with a smoky voice, sounding like the mature counterpart of the victim in "Criminal." "To Your Love" continues this voice, backing it with staccato piano hits, timpani-smashes, and during its chorus a Santana-esque guitar line. The first all-out attack comes in "Limp," featuring the switch from Fiona's submissive mood to her inner-aggressor, a verbally-assaulting femme fatale who would rather play with the Sex Pistols than Janis Joplin. The song starts with climb-up piano chords and water-drop percussion like that ending Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On," but within 50 seconds it morphs into Fiona's thrash backed by continually fastening paranoid instruments behind her. The song's peak, however, is when an extra inch of rasp crawls into Fiona's delivery while the bass falls beneath her accompanied by muted bongos gone haywire.

This new face of Fiona shocks but is expected. Looking at the cover photo of "When the Pawn...," we see one half of Fiona's seeming bipolar vocal capabilities, that half being the emotionally-distraught woman continuously hiding her sadness with a faux-smile. The other side is pictured on the back cover, a turned-away Fiona representing her f*ck-the-world verbally discharging self, once attempted by Alanis Morissette on her "Jagged Little Pill" and now perfected on "When the Pawn..." The other prime example of this face of Fiona emerging is on the album's standout, "Fast As You Can." Secretly a pastiche of the pop culture music movement in the nineties, Fiona takes the coked-up bongos from the percussion section in Bjork's "Miss You" and loosely strings them together with a few piano hits for the song's verses. The most interesting part of these verses, though, is Fiona's free-verse rambling, only calmed when the song salsa-spirals into its chorus, a mere hyping-up of Beck's "Derelict." The song's midsection boasts a free-form jazz drone, giving Fiona a breath of air to make an offer in between the song's otherwise spontaneous awakenings.

Elsewhere, Fiona is able to sew a patchwork of imitations into beautifully melodies like she does throughout "Fast As You Can." "Paper Bag" could be Beatle-esque if McCartney let Yoko Ono pen all of the love song lyrics. "Get Gone" melds the storytelling vibe that Tori Amos has always had with a piano-rollick refrain that could be attributed to Carole King if she married Thom Yorke.

Throughout this album, Fiona proves her worth and keeps the interest of millions of fans who would have liked to dispose her as soon as MTV put the "Criminal" video out of rotation. At the same time, she has made thousands of critics fall in love with her broken heart, something that among the female singer-songwriters only Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette have really done. But Fiona is something with much more potential than Alanis; as opposed to imitating her and saying "You Oughta Know," Fiona closes her album by telling every "I Know." And in this song, she tells us exactly what she does know: "I am your crowbar." Finally, someone has entered into the music world who instead of denying it openly embraces the fact that they are a complete tool for the giant vulture circle that is the pop culture movement. The difference, though, is that Fiona is a tool who we all love to use.

I've had this cd for a few years now and i still find myself playing it on repeat. Fiona Apple has on of the most distinguished, amazing voices ever and her lyrical poetry reinforces her talents as a singer/songwriter. Though the songs are in regards to love and individuality and hate, you will leave feeling overwhelmed by a sense of self. Ms. Apple's music is that of perfection in the dark and i can see no other artist gaining the momentum she already has. Can't wait for the new album this year, "Extraordinary Machine"!!!!!