Live Review: Fiona Apple

Live Review: Fiona Apple

Years of silence have hardly dulled Fiona Apple's intensity. She's back, wielding it like a sharp knife: Aidin Vaziri | Apple, now 28, still looks like she could flip out at any moment. When she isn't sipping tea behind an enormous piano, she stands in the spotlight with her shoulders stiff, eyes locked on some ghost on the horizon, knees twitching gawkily in time to the rhythms. Her knuckles look red and swollen as if she has just been punching the walls backstage. The new songs from "Extraordinary Machine," her third album, are especially intense. Which is to say they sound even more thunderous and emotionally ravaged than Apple's older tunes like "Limp" (lyrical kicker: "It won't be long till you'll be lying limp in your own hand") and "Sleep To Dream" ("I got my own hell to raise"), one of the few tracks she pulled from her triple-platinum 1996 debut album, "Tidal." She introduced the barbed "Oh Well" by announcing, "Boy, was I having a bad day when this song was written." Is it merely a coincidence that her ex-boyfriends like magician David Blaine and director Paul Thomas Anderson have all but disappeared? There's a thrilling sense that we're all headed for revelation together. Not only does she make it through the entire 90-minute set and belt out an acoustic version of the album's title track during an encore, but for just a brief second, it actually looks like Apple might be trying to fight back a smile.