Trigger Warning: This album (and review) contain content relating to sexual assault.
Alex Thompson dives into the weird and wonderful world of Fiona Apple with Fetch The Bolt Cutters
Fiona Apple is one of the most elusive artists over the past few decades, having only dropped 5 albums in an almost 25 year career. 8 years on from her previous album, she’s back with a record that sounds quite unlike anything else in her back catalogue, quite unlike anything else in general. Fetch The Bolt Cutters, it’s about to get mad.
Even before I got round to listening to this album, I’d seen the hype. The glowing reviews, Pitchfork 10 and undoubtedly Fantano is currently donning his yellow flannel for a review. I went in with high hopes, expecting to be blown away. The reviews promised this album to be one of the best of the past decade. The question was, would it live up to the hype?
Fetch The Bolt Cutters sounds like it was made for quarantine. It’s eerie and intimate, sinister banging and clattering accompanying close and breathy vocals, creating slowly creepy atmospheres of claustrophobia and anxiety. This can be sinister on tracks like ‘On I Go’. It can be powerful and uplifting on ‘I Want You To Love Me’ where Apple’s vocals pierce the clattering piano instrumental with an unwavering clarity and life. It can also be a little bit cringey, I’m looking at you ‘Cosmonauts’. Tracks like ‘Shameika’ go from sounding incredibly cluttered and busy to sparse and empty. Cluttered in this sense isn’t a critique, the building crescendo of echo-soaked vocals, honky-tonk piano and kinetic percussion feels beautifully chaotic and full of a unique character and voice. The sheer amount going on is admirable, a cacophony of sounds and textures creating an aesthetic quite unlike anything else. Some dog barks even make it onto the album, with 5 separate dogs credited on the title track.
Is Fetch The Bolt Cutters boundary pushing and experimental or is it just trying too hard to be quirky? I’ve heard both argued and I’d agree more with the former however I do find the album does occasionally drift towards being weird just for the sake of it with little pay off at times.
Do you really need to rattle a box of dog bones?
While it does verge on the cringey side of weird, there is a lot to love about the weirdness of this album. It’s more chaotic and brilliantly experimental than anything she’s done before, a flurry of piano and kicking percussion, swallowed up in echo and jazzy chords with Apple’s voice gliding beautifully atop it all. These dense and cluttered instrumentals are produced with a delicate touch, no easy feat considering how much seems to be going on. It’s chaotic without being overwhelming, dense without being impenetrable.
She transitions expertly from the clatters and bangs of homemade percussion on tracks like ‘Newspaper’ to the slow double bass and piano shuffle and soulful vocals of ‘Ladies’. Apple excels in contrasts, the album packing sudden changes in tone, tempo and atmosphere that serve to create a somewhat fragmented feel. Transitions can be jarring and unpredictable, the whole album feeling raw and jagged. At times this is great. At other points it leaves tracks feeling dislocated, breaking the flow of the album and isolating tracks.
This links into another critique of the album - the pacing. I know this is a pretty millennial thing to say but it does go on a bit, stretching out to a hefty 51 minutes. With only 13 tracks, that leaves a lot of flab with some tracks feeling like they could be cut short. I’m not opposed to lengthy songs, but they do need to go somewhere.
Apple’s voice dives between guttural howls, beautiful harmonies and spoken passages with an unrivaled flexibility. Breathy, fluttering and full of character and punch, these vocals hold the album together and add to that unique, artsy aesthetic Apple constructs. Lyrics are her most confessional, vivid and vulnerable to date, skewering notions of gender and identity with a wistful, desperate quality. Fetch The Bolt Cutters is full of moments of desperation, loneliness and angst - accidentally tapping into the mood of the nation during lockdown.
‘For Her’ is perhaps the most haunting and emotionally charged song of the bunch, an eerie acapella track with sinister, harmonised vocals detailing the exploitation and sexual abuse of women and children. The gut punch of “good morning, you raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in'' is a devastating end to a song, bleak and uncompromising. Apple here is at her most confrontational, confessional and melancholy. ‘For Her’ is a horrific yet urgent battlecry to the victims of sexual assault with Apple herself being a victim of sexual abuse as a child. Written in 2018 after the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, this is one of the most important and unsettling songs I have heard in a long time.
Overall, Fetch The Bolt Cuts is an odd yet intriguing listen. The densely layered instrumentals and chaotic, cluttered percussion give it a tonal quality quite unlike anything else. Vocals are excellent, diving between breathy, beautiful harmonies to guttural howls and screams. Lyrics verge from being a little cringey at times to utterly engrossing and powerful Apple really shines on tracks like ‘Shameika’ and ‘For Her’ where her confessional, vulnerable is front and centre. At it’s best, Fetch The Bolt Cutters is cutting and haunting with biting feminist critique and powerful instrumental motifs. At its worst it feels like it’s trying a little too hard.
Does it live up to the hype? In short, I don’t really know. I certainly wasn’t blown away like I expected to be from the glowing reviews and critical praise but I found a lot to love and a lot to make me think. And that’s what’s important I guess.
8/10
Alex Thompson
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