Though often bracketed with Alanis Morissette, a fairer This Product Contains list for Fiona Apple would include Kate Bush and Tori Amos. Yet Apple is sufficiently interesting in her own right not to require a School of Description. Raped at the age of 12 and - small wonder - finding adolescence a fraught and suicidal obstacle course, she arrived in 1996 with a debut album that balanced apologetic confessional with strident polemic. The follow-up sees the latter in the ascendant; if anything, Apple is angrier than before. Limp, Get Gone, To Your Love and On The Bound are all uncompromisingly direct, Apple alternately growling and ululating over a punchy mix of jazz piano and colliding time signatures. Fast As You Can epitomises Apple's current form: in the outro, when she sidesteps the beat and warns "fast as you can" in syncopation, it is both menacing and sublime. 

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