Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters ★★★★
Fiona Apple simmered in the LA sun for eight years to make this record. Rather than polish the result to a sleek gleam, this is an album of trailing threads and percussive clatter, layered like unwiped tape. The brightly shining teenage angst queen of the Nineties continues to rub herself raw.
The title is inspired by Gillian Anderson’s sex-crime cop’s demand in The Fall, when a room where a girl has been tortured needs breaking open. Cutters fetched, Apple heads right in.
Building on the Waitsian, bone-machine percussive sound of The Idler Wheel… (2012), this is the mutant musical offspring of PJ Harvey’s 4-Track Demos and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.
The emotional excavation from its combination of abrasion and craft is clearest on “I Want You to Love Me”.
Apple is classically trained and loves jazz, and her flowing, long piano lines collapse into clamorous chaos as her bouncing voice becomes a gasp.
“And while I’m in this body… I want what I want, and I want you,” she insists. Having covered Elvis Costello’s classic of bleeding jealousy, “I Want You”, Apple claims such violent powers for herself.
Floating away to somewhere better
“For Her” is the song which most overtly contemplates the #MeToo era, referencing the sort of Hollywood decadence Harvey Weinstein might once have attended.
But it ends with floating harmonies flying away to somewhere better.
This is an album which turns the sound of panic attacks and self-loathing into proudly rigorous art.
It is another step out of the title’s locked room.
Download: I Want You to Love Me, For Her, Under the Table, Fetch the Bolt Cutters from April 17