Album Review: Fetch The Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple

By: Cecilia Gigliotti

Thumbnail Photo by: Jennifer Fiorile

One Year of FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS

May 9, 2021.

Allow me to make a potentially preposterous statement: I was not familiar with any of Fiona Apple’s music until the release of her latest album last spring.

I know, I know. The emotional women of the ‘90s never had pride of place in my musical education, probably because by the time my parents produced their children and caught up with themselves, the pop world had been inherited by Vanessa Carlton and Avril Lavigne. Of course, I knew of Fiona Apple; maybe (more likely?) I had heard some single somewhere without being conscious of whose it was. But the appropriate moment for me to cross paths with her catalogue had yet to strike.

Two months into pandemic-induced lockdown, I sat cross-legged on a friend’s floor, her dog in my lap. This friend and I had been coworkers until a recent, jarring layoff had set us free. Or adrift. Our company had moved us both to Berlin—me from the United States, her from England—and now left us to our own devices. At the moment, there was nothing for us but to cling together in search of a semblance of stability.

That afternoon, we prepared to go walking in the wooded park across the road from her flat, where social distancing would be easy. Like me, she was a musician, except she looked more legitimately so, her sitting room crowded with guitars and amplifiers and a keyboard. In fact, we had co-written and performed a song on what turned out to be one of our last work projects. She always kept a record playing in the background. As I petted her dog, a small meek thing still acclimating to post-shelter life, I became sensible of a verse repeating steadily through the speakers:

I too used to want him to be proud of me

And then I just wanted him to make amends

I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me

To make sure that we’ll never be friends

And it’s a shame because you and I didn’t get a witness

We’re the only ones who know

We were cursed the moment that he kissed us

From then on it was his big show

Each reiteration of verse and chorus compounded the voices, layering harmonies, calls and responses. Sometimes the sound would build to a wall, sometimes dwindle to a lone voice sustaining a lone melody. Moreover, each verse altered the lyric slightly; it was all a first-time listener could do to keep pace. Perhaps most striking of all, the voices were the only arbiters of pitch on the track, backed by an intricate web of percussion, syncopated rhythms interlocking, leaving not a single beat unaccounted for.

The effect was gradual and mesmerizing. I was transfixed before I knew better. It took my friend’s appearance in the doorway to startle me out of my near-catatonic state. “What is this we’re listening to?” I asked. She told me it was Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

As a streaming-service subscriber, I’d had a surface awareness of the record in the run-up to its debut, albeit with no intentions to go out of my way to listen. Even if my friend, whose artistic opinions I valued, had recommended it out of context, I can’t be sure I would have taken it to heart. But this taste, of a song I later found out was called “Newspaper,” made me hunger for more.

Like much of my musical education, it was both accidental and transformative. Apple’s new work—every facet of it, from the text to the instrumentation to the ambient noise—suited the first anxious weeks of isolation; but I grew to admire it, identify with it, depend on it more deeply and roundly as weeks rolled into months and months into the year-plus it has now been. It invaded my worldview and imposed itself on what I thought I knew.

And why shouldn’t it? The artist is a Virgo, like me, and made a crucial contribution to my ongoing discovery of the tremendous currency of anger. Anger, in her voice, was vitality. No matter the harshness of the words themselves, coming from her, they sounded like an indictment. When she rasped, “I resent you for being tall/I resent you for never getting any opposition at all” on “Relay,” an off-kilter playground chant of multiple time signatures, something in my bones shouted yes! When she insisted, “I need to run up that hill/I need to run up that hill/I will, I will, I will, I will, I will” on the eponymous track, I shuddered at the thought of the tentative freelancer life I presumed to forge for myself when paralyzing fear stopped me writing a word some days. When she quoted “good mornin’, good mornin’” in direct homage to Singin’ in the Rain—one of the movie musicals on which I was raised—the line that completed the couplet delivered all the more of a gut punch: “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.”

I’d spent years tamping down rage, internalizing the message that it was acceptable, even encouraged, to look down on women who let it loose. Apple, in real-time, swept any last vestiges of that notion from the back of my mind. On “Ladies,” she declares what I consider to be the album’s central sentiment:

Nobody can replace anybody else

So it would be a shame to make it a competition

And no love is like any other love

So it would be insane to make a comparison with you

In the quiet of my quarantine chamber, I communed with every woman I’d ever known, hoping they were hearing what I was . Even aside from the undeniable womanity, implicit and explicit, there was so much to hear—forever something new to dig up among these thirteen tracks. I had no trouble believing the task of refining the songs had taken Apple the eight years since her last LP. The percussion alone was probably the most absorbing I’d encountered since Pet Sounds, a homegrown any-available-surface feel coupled with a professional precision. Most of the voices were Apple’s, spanning her range, a host of versions of herself in consensus. Yes, there were hints of my beloved Joni Mitchell in her Canadian lilt (“like you know you should know but you don’t know/like you know you should know but you don’t know what you did,” triad-laden phrases doubling back on themselves); but there were stronger edges of Janis Joplin and Yoko Ono to her timbre (“and I want you to use it/blast the music/bang it, bite it, bruise it,” plus the rest of “I Want You to Love Me”). She was totally compelling.

Apple is a pianist, but her creations don’t shy away from giving other instruments (and instrumentalists) their moment in the sun. Guitar and bass provide an understated pulse to tracks like “Relay” and “Heavy Balloon”; “Rack of His” features an organ as attention-grabbing as the tritone in its main motif, and the drums that drive “On I Go” leave even a sometime choral-conducting student puzzling over what the count is. Orchestration is ultimately in service of the text. The composer is forty-two years old by the time of the album’s unveiling, and she knows exactly what she is doing.

Time and again I return to “Newspaper.” From probably my second listen onward, it was as if it had always existed, predating me and the population of my world. Those songs I find to be few and far between. But then, if I endeavored to list every lyric that hit home for me here, I would spell out two-thirds of the album at least.

One of these days I will get around to the other records. I will piece together a broader perspective of the artist. For now, there’s actually no need to fetch the bolt cutters. I haven’t been in here too long, not yet.