Music Review: Fiona Apple’s ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’
Fiona Apple's surprise early release is raw, funny and unabashedly sharp
Fetch the Bolt Cutters couldn’t have come at a better time and Fiona Apple knew it. Like many artists with new music on hand, she decided to release her album early, in this case roughly six months ahead of schedule. And like many of her peers, she has accidentally put out an album spectacularly well-suited to the current moment, right down to writing and recording it from her own home.
It is an unconventional record, but in a way that we would expect from Apple. Its structure, if it can be called a structure at all, is complex and seemingly random, a feeling that is reflected in its mood. Her lyrics, both sung and spoken, are delivered among other vocalizations ranging from scatting to shrieks to hisses to whispers. Few artists, let alone those with her profile and prominence, could deliver that range and get away with it.
It’s a chaotic album that is in many ways a reaction to a chaotic world, both outside and in. Apple deals with a lot of pain and hurt throughout Fetch the Bolt Cutters (★★★★★), touching on the entire spectrum of harm from petty slights to deep, traumatic wounds.
She returns again and again to the harm that men do to women, and the knock-on effects of that harm. “When I learned what he did, I felt close to you,” she confesses to an ex’s new partner on the tense and unsettling “Newspaper,” admitting “In my own way, I fell in love with you.” Elsewhere, she pulls even fewer punches. “Good morning,” she spits in the outro to the fantastic “For Her.” “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” It’s a stark, arresting line that, after a jaunty song skewering performative masculinity, lands like a brick dropped out of a window.
Apple also ruminates on her feelings of solidarity and responsibility towards other women, sometimes real and sometimes imagined but intensely felt either way. “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me,” she muses on “Newspaper,” forging a camaraderie in her own head with a woman who she imagines has been, and is about to be, hurt the same ways she has been.
On “Shameika,” in a lyric that has already been riffed on countless times since the album’s release, Apple reminisces on a time decades ago when a classmate told her she “had potential.” In that single line, she captures how powerful an impact words of praise from a total stranger can have, when delivered in the right way at the right time.
True to form, however, Apple does not limit herself to righteous anger and resignation, present as they are. Her wit is sharp as ever, and this album finds her more pointed and playful than she has ever been. The complexity and the abruptness with which she shifts and switches from humor to melancholy to rage is both unsettling and compelling.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters finds Fiona Apple once again making uniquely captivating and infectious music on her own terms, whether we’re along for the ride or not.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music.
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