Not-Quite-As-Extraordinary Machine
Saturday, October 8, 2005 at 10:18AM 2 Comments Following months of speculation, Fiona Apple's re-recorded Extraordinary Machine was offically released on Tuesday. After the initial Jon Brion-produced recording leaked in dribs and drabs over the Internets a few months back, Apple re-recorded nearly the entire album with producer Mike Elizondo, who's known for his work with Dr. Dre. Yep. Dr. Dre.
In an interview on NPR, Apple said something along the lines of how while a Jon Brion album is a great thing, she didn't want to make a Jon Brion album.
OK, great. I can see that. Brion's work has a distinct sound that can consume Aimee Mann or Fiona Apple and subjugate the vocals to the production. But having heard the 30-second clips of the new versions on iTunes, I happen to like the Brion version a lot better. The strings, the counter-melodies, and the lush production seem to fit the material better than Elizondo's very stripped-down approach.
In a new review, Pitchfork scored the Brion version a 7.8 and the Elizondo version a 6.2:
You can also pour a 40 out for fallen countermelodies, as Elizondo hacks away Brion's embellishments upon "Not About Love" and "Window" in his efforts to keep the spotlight fixed solely on the star...
The shame of it all is that Apple, after six years of silence, could've made a more definitive, progressive statement rather than something familiar and similar-- and we've got the bootlegs to prove it.
Via Stereogum, an Entertainment Weekly interview finds Brion sanguine about the situation:
It's just not that big a deal. My concern from the get-go was that there be another Fiona Apple record. I don't need to have more records with my name on them.
If you're still looking for the Brion version, here's a BitTorrent file. I'm glad I have a copy; it would have been unfortunate for it to have gone unheard.
Someone ought to set up a PayPal account or something where you can send $10 to "buy" your copy of the Brion version.
Reader Comments (2)
Hey there, for some reason the torrent link (for Fiona) comes up as an empty zip file when I download it. Any chance of you providing another link to Fiona's Jon Brion version of Extraordinary Machine? It would be much appreciated (or the pay pal account for $10 a pop sounds good, too).
Hollis - I'll shoot you an e-mail and we can talk more about how you can get a copy.