Artist: Fiona Apple Year Released: 2012 Get This Album

A magnificent meltdown from a songwriter who describes herself as “a tulip in a cup”: catastrophic states of mind translated into unnervingly perky tunes and precisely turned phrases, polished until they gleam, then stripped to a skeleton, then polished again. The Idler Wheel is a very, very raw album, musically and emotionally — it’s little more than Apple’s voice and piano and Charley Drayton’s percussion, and it opens with a ditty about panic attacks — but it’s also wry, playful and self-aware, and Apple’s voice sparkles in the unforgiving light of its arrangements.