Fiona Apple has spent two albums warning suitors to stay away because she’s a mess, and apparently she’s not kidding.
She’s a piano-playing hurricane one minute, a car crash the next. Only two weeks ago, she experienced meltdown onstage in New York, collapsing in tears six songs into a concert and walking off, never to return. Call her unprofessional, insufferable or a prima donna, but don’t call her a gimmick. At a time when concerts are programmed tighter than a production of “Cats,” Apple is a refreshing antidote.
On Saturday at the Riviera, she got lost in her music from the start, emerging from her personal communion only occasionally to acknowledge the presence of a packed house with a smile or a wave. This wasn’t a concert so much as a private therapy session, with 2,000-plus voyeurs peering through the keyhole of Apple’s psyche to spy the bruises. She spoke not so much to her lovers, but to her other, bad self: “It’s a sad, sad world when a girl will break a boy just because she can.”
Apple’s left arm twitched when she stood at the microphone, flying spastically as if trying to detach from her shoulder. She was a voice megaphoning through a forest of tangled hair; she didn’t so much dance as try to twitch loose from an unseen straitjacket; even when she stood still, her posture was coiled, ready to pounce.
Her between-songs patter remained brutally awkward, but she was showered with trinkets, bracelets, roses, even a bra, which she carefully stashed atop her grand piano. When she finally felt obliged to say something, she stammered, prompting an audience member to offer a helpful suggestion: “Just sing!”
Apple put all into her songs of twisted obsession, the cannily arranged bits of pop-soul with hints of the Beatles, Nina Simone and the Marquis de Sade. Her band drowned out her piano on the louder numbers, but the rhythmic drive–supplied by the supple shadings of drummer Matt Chamberlain–flushed out the preciousness that once threatened to drown her music. Now she feels the grit on her tongue, and she rides the shifting meters of “Fast as You Can” with her vibrato bearing down hard, her hips wiggling like a belly dancer’s.
The gothic chill of Jebbin Bruni’s keyboards gave the music a haunted glow, particularly on the night’s centerpiece, a sparse reading of “Love Ridden,” the sullen world-weariness in her alto conjuring the spirit of Laura Nyro.
In contrast, “Get Gone” veered between conversational cadences and increasingly agitated declarations of independence. On the last go-round, Apple’s insistence that “I do know what’s good for me!” sounded like a threat. “Sing, sing, sing,” she roared, as though cutting through the confusion to find the only thing that matters. On a solo encore version of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things,” she sang again–this time with a smile, aware that the evening was coming to a close and the car hadn’t crashed. This time.
