UK Edition
Review
Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters review: a masterpiece for the #MeToo era
Given the circumstances we find ourselves under, it is welcome to receive an album that rewards repeated listening. Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters presents the volatile American singer-songwriter at her most raw and strange. Recorded over several years at her home in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, its unwieldy yet deeply felt songs defy conventional forms and arrangements.
Apple’s multi-tracked vocals unfold with an air of almost childish melodic extemporisation over percussive rhythms tracks made with household objects (including rubber bands, empty oil cans and baked seedpods). The album has a solipsistic and provocatively amateurish quality, but stick with it, because there is real depth of feeling, wit and thought on display that grows richer the deeper you dig.
With her 1996 debut album Tidal, Apple arrived as a teenage prodigy, a sensitive piano-based songwriter channeling the emotional spirit of grunge. Outspoken and determined to cleave a revelatory, autobiographical path through music, she might be viewed as a precursor to today’s goth pop sensation, Billie Eilish, but Apple has also been characterised (or, perhaps, demonised) as a high-strung eccentric in the vein of Sinead O’Connor.
She has talked candidly about the impact on her mental health of being raped by a stranger at the age of 12, and her songs negotiate dark areas between victim and survivor, grappling with depression and compulsion, and driven by urgent truth-telling. She is not prolific and has struggled with the attention of fame and rigours of touring. This is only her fifth album in 24 years, and her first since 2012. But, at 42-years-old, it reveals her, once again, to be one of the finest songwriters and boldest voices of her generation.
The title, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, is a quote from BBC drama series The Fall, spoken by Gillian Anderson’s sex crimes investigator at a crime-scene where a woman was tortured. The whole album has the feel of a volcanic outpouring of emotion, from the needy attack of opening track I Want You To Love Me to the startling closing chants of On I Go, with its savage opening lines: “Good morning! Good morning/ You raped me in the bed your daughter was born in.”
It is an album for the post-Weinstein #MeToo moment, and Apple is entering into this dangerous arena with no holds barred. Honestly, you wouldn’t want to be amongst her famous exes (including film director Paul Thomas Anderson, disgraced comedian Louis CK and magician David Blaine) wondering if you were the subject of any of these songs. Sexual power, unequal and abusive relationships, dangerous desire and, on the other side, healing and self-care are Apple’s subject matter, though they are not always portrayed with the white-knuckle brutality of Relay (“Evil is a relay sport/ When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch”). Wit, tenderness and humour are found here, too, with the blackly amusing Under The Table depicting the kind of skirmish at a dinner party that most couples will recognise: “Kick me under the table all you want/ I won’t shut up!”
Apple’s lyric writing is of the highest standard, even as it moves into the abstractions of her depression incantation Heavy Balloon (“I spread like strawberries/ I climb like peas and beans/ I’ve been sucking it in so long/ That I’m busting at the seams”). Her melodiousness holds together these strangely structured songs, whilst the boldness of her unusual arrangements forces you to adjust your ears and delve deeper into what she is trying to convey. With barking dogs and Cara Delevigne meowing like a cat, it doesn’t really sound like anything else out there right now, although it might bring to mind the work of Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones at their most high-strung. The music often has elements of jazzy seductiveness, the bass playing is liquid and delicious, and Apple’s honey and whiskey voice is a treat, even when she pushes it to its harshest edges. There is no digital smoothing, none of the Autotuned vocals or programmed beats that every home recording artist uses these days to mimic professional pop studios.
This is an album that conveys one woman’s rage, vulnerability, confusion and wisdom in ways that we haven’t quite heard before. “Be good to me, it isn’t a game,” Apple sings on the tender Cosmonauts. Fetch the Bolt Cutters feels about as real as music can be.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters is released on April 17 by Clean Slate and Epic Records