Fiona Apple

It's been six years since Fiona Apple's last commercial release and almost two years since an earlier version of Extraordinary Machine was leaked to the public. Long gone are the Maya Angelou acceptance speeches, the ninety-word album titles and the suggestive music videos of the frail teenager in the bathtub. Such pretensions have latched onto the coattails of the industry's more recent upstarts-after all, fellow piano divas Norah Jones, Vanessa Carlton and Alicia Keys are respectively two, three and four years her junior. Not that Fiona Apple relying only on her music for success is a bad thing.

Apple can't go wrong with her arsenal of classic throaty crooning and whimsical chord-pounding, but her latest work has none of the sauciness of Tidal or the caustic insight that weaves all through When the Pawn. The skittish drolls of songs like "Extraordinary Machine" and "Tymps" provide enough satisfaction to make the album worthwhile, but perhaps its greatest value lies in reminding you just how great When the Pawn really was.

Yes, the spectre of the leaked Extraordinary Machine might permit an unfair glance at the work in progress, dispelling some of the magic in her creative process. Aiming for a sparser and more mature sound, she parted ways with producer-composer Jon Brion, the mastermind behind her first two albums, after her purported dissatisfaction with the recordings of the third album he had made. Fortunately, Brion's cuts made it to the Internet, and as much as the completed songs deserved to be evaluated as independent musical entities, the context surrounding the two cuts will never go away.

The newer version is generally more accessible than before. It relieves the tension latent in songs like "O' Sailor" and "Please Please Please," but, while the technique serves to make the former song more palatable, it strips the latter of all its charm, leaving in its place pure melodrama. But honestly, when it comes down to it, just make an iTunes playlist of the title track followed by "Paper Bag" and watch those play counts shoot up.