Fiona Apple

Fiona Apple isn't as starved for nourishment and affection as she looks in her photos. There is a mature heft in her voice -- more than you would expect from someone just at the exit door of adolescence -- that theatrically elevates even Apple's most brazen fits of honesty (like "Sullen Girl," an autobiographical account of life after rape). Nor does she overdo the victim thang; you can hear swagger as well as regret in the way Apple sings "I've been a bad bad girl" in "Criminal." "Tidal" is the work of a formative artist; Apple name-checks the black poet Maya Angelou in the credits, but the album is heavier with the art-song manners of Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. Still, Apple has a precocious flair for tart minor-mode flourishes in her melodies, and the dash of hip-hop flava in "The First Taste" shows she's got more on her agenda than the empty-bed blues. "I got my own hell to raise," Apple claims in "Sleep to Dream"; next time, she should let it all come out.

Erykah Badu lets everything she's got -- illicit desire ("Next Lifetime"), major heart burn ("Sometimes"), battered but steady-rollin' pride ("On and On") -- hang out with bewitching assurance on her hit debut, "Baduizm." As a singer, she's in no hurry to impress. Badu drapes her clear, fluid voice over slow-jack-swing backing tracks like she's unfurling a roll of diaphanous, honey-colored silk. "Baduizm," like a lot of contemporary R&B albums, falters when Badu and her producers (including sharp-eared newcomer Madukwu Chinwah and the Philadelp