A Fiona Apple record is a study in meticulousness and mayhem. The meticulousness is in the music – the rigorous art-pop constructions that mark Apple as an heir to songwriting sophisticates like Stephen Sondheim and Elvis Costello. And the mayhem? That's Apple herself. For a decade and a half she has been one of pop's most volatile presences: pouting, lamenting, raging, jabbing a poison pen at ruthless fate and callous ex-lovers, but always turning her most savage attacks inward, at herself.

Apple's wild-eyed self-dramatization has been her hallmark from the beginning. On Tidal (1996), the smash debut released when she was just 18, it seemed like adolescent angst, a mannerism she might age out of. Today, we know better: Apple's great theme – her only theme, really – is the heroic struggle going on within her own brain.

Her last album, 2005's Extraordinary Machine, was a richly produced chronicle of her breakup with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. The Idler Wheel... is just as rawboned emotionally, and more hard- hitting musically. She pours out her distress on driving songs with lyrics that mix romantic poetry and therapy-speak – Byron by way of Oprah. "I'm an airplane/And the gashes I got from my heartbreak/ Make the slots and the flaps upon my wing/And I use 'em to give me lift," she sings on "Daredevil." You don't ex- pect restraint from a woman whose album title takes the form of a 23-word rhymed couplet.

From another performer, lines like those would be a deal breaker. But with Apple you can excuse them, and even learn to love them. Apple is a true eccentric. On The Idler Wheel..., surprises lurk around every corner. "Left Alone" begins with some battering jazz-style drumming and segues into a deranged boogie-woogie; in "Hot Knife," a double-entendre chorus worthy of an old blues is chirruped by a multitracked choir of Apples. Throughout, Apple sings amazingly, wringing different colors from her voice in every song – twittering like a folky songbird, crooning like a cabaret chanteuse, howling like a blueswoman.

The Idler Wheel... is a challenging album. The songs are intricately arranged but sonically stark, foregrounding Apple's piano and the stupendous drumming of Charley Drayton. There's not a single big, chewy hook on the album. Sometimes the songs drag. The pallid piano ballad "Jonathan" – apparently a mash note to her former beau, the writer Jonathan Ames – would be a trial to sit through if it were two minutes long. It's five-plus.

But Apple's kooky energy pushes through the slow spots. And there's another kind of less out-there intensity here: the erotic kind. The most arresting singing on the album comes midway through "Daredevil," when a skittering arrangement – a kind of drunken cocktail- jazz lurch – screeches to a halt: "Wake me up – gimme, gimme, gimme what you/Got in your mind in the middle of the night!" For a moment, it's like she shares the same desires as the rest of us – even if she expresses them in a language that's utterly her own.

Listen to 'The Idler Wheel...':

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“Tonight's the Night”

The lead cut and title track from this girl group's debut album, "Tonight's the Night" was written by 19-year-old bandmember Shirley Owens, who sings lead, and producer Luther Dixon. The band from Passaic, New Jersey met in high school, first calling themselves the Pequellos. The song's frank thoughts about sexual and emotional surrender was racy for the time, but that didn't stop the Chiffons from cutting a similar version immediately after the original came out. "We were the first female group to write some of our own material," band member Beverly Lee recalls. "We did have some say-so in our writing."