album review: 'fetch the bolt cutters' by fiona apple

In a way, it feels like I’ve already made this review, or that I’ve been writing it for years already.

And I think to some extent it’s overdue, because Fiona Apple is the sort of artist whose legacy looms pretty large over a lot of acts I like and I’ve praised, so much so that going back to her first few albums almost feels familiar on a different dimension. Also I’m fairly certain that the vast majority of women I’ve dated have been fans of Fiona Apple so even when I wasn’t altogether familiar with her work, I had already absorbed her albums by osmosis over the past decade anyway!

What I find bizarre, though, is how it’s often emphasized by some critics that Fiona Apple is difficult to discuss or analyze, which in the realm of singer-songwriters I’ve always felt is kind of off-base. Hell, in my opinion one of Fiona Apple’s greatest strengths is how accessible she can be, especially on her first two albums that took a blur of smoldering alternative rock, jazz, singer-songwriter material, piano rock, and even trip hop in their compositions… but she wrote hooks and while the relationship drama she described was emotionally complex, it wasn’t impenetrable. But if you read criticism of her from the mid-to-late 90s, it almost seemed like her approach to raw, sexually charged, incredibly intense relationship songs baffled predominantly male critics and music press, and they seemed more ready to call her ‘provocative’, an irony-drenched media landscape looking for the easy box to confine her because nothing she was saying, particularly about sexual assault and rape, could be that real, right?

Yeah, thankfully media discourse has evolved a bit since the 90s and 2000s, but on the other hand, I’m living in the world full of Fiona Apple’s artistic descendants, from Florence Welch to Adele to Neko Case to St. Vincent to Dessa to even Lorde, not to mention the dozens of women who took to the piano to mine Apple’s accessibility without really treading the darker waters in which she swam. But the other complicating factor is that Fiona Apple’s output got a lot more sporadic - her vocal tone got huskier, her mixes more jittery and full of clattering percussion and baroque touches… and this led to mixed results. I don’t think she’s put out a bad album, but Extraordinary Machine is not great and as much as I really like The Idler Wheel… etc., outside of moments it’s not a project I love, mostly because some of the eccentric production choices didn’t quite feel like more than the sum of their parts. But now we have Fetch The Bolt Cutters… and I’ll admit, it’s been difficult to tamp down on my own expectations, given how frankly insane the critical hype has been, especially from one particular outlet. I needed to give this a little more time to sink in, fully absorb what she delivered, and if I was to hop onboard the hype train, it would only be of my own volition. So okay, what did we find on Fetch The Bolt Cutters?

…you know, I wanted to make this a standalone review because Fiona Apple is an artist to which I feel demands a more complicated discussion than what I’d normally provide in shortform… but the weird thing about Fetch The Bolt Cutters is that for as tempestuous and frenetic as it can feel, once you become accustomed to its rhythms, daunting as they are, it’s not quite a project that surprises or shocks me, certainly not to the degree so many people are falling over themselves to proclaim. That’s not saying it’s not a great album - it absolutely is, I’d argue it’s her best worst since the 90s and features some genuinely impressive moments where the tension is nervewracking and you’re listening to Apple hold the song together on force of will… but I’m not sure I’d put it among my best of the year thus far and it’ll be interesting to see where this lands for me in eight months. Part of this is the continuation of elements I didn’t quite love on The Idler Wheel…, but this album also has some unique hangups, and without necessarily condemning this I do want to highlight some parallels to existing work that absolutely exists.

Because that’s important: in a lot of the praise I’ve seen Fetch The Bolt Cutters described as unprecedented in sound and approach and content, only maybe highlighting Yoko Ono’s experimentation as the most obvious peer, but I’d argue you don’t even need to go there. The comparison that sprung to mind for me almost immediately was Neko Case’s last album Hell-On, which the grooves are absolutely more conventional but the song structures and melodies can be just as extended and warped and paradoxically just as deceptively catchy. More to the point, in the content and themes there are obvious parallels in the primal storm of emotions hemmed in and seeking the outlets to burst, feminist in its wealth of expression and its comfort in complexity and emotive abstraction. And to some degree they’re both albums that require time and patience to absorb, where accessibility can be a challenge in their own way - in both cases in terms of melodies, for Neko Case in her tangled songwriting, for Fiona Apple in her sound, where Case was able to cushion and amplify herself in the production Apple’s raw tones and multi-tracked harmonies careen off every rattle and fractured melody and are often split by the sound of her own barking dogs!

And it’s not perfect - intentionally so, I would add, so discussing where the fractures work or don’t is a complicated and very subjective conversation. For instance, there are a scattered few songs on this project that Fiona Apple has been performing live since around 2013 - of which I’ve always felt a little weird, if you know that it can take you out of a self-contained work, and even if Apple is making that a point it does get distracting. And while I really like ‘Ladies’ in the context of the album given the revisions it has seen since, I’m not nearly as fond of an older song ‘I Want You To Love Me’ used as the opener - from a compositional standpoint it’s not quite as sharp, the extended outro doesn’t help as her voice begins to creak, and it feels awkward to start a project like this when anticipation is so high. And while I’m on the subject of structure, it can feel a little awkward - I get that the flow is supposed to be kind of ramshackle and stop-and-start, playing on wild unpredictability and waves of emotion, but that can lead to lulls that don’t have the same intensity as the scattered high point. And I’ll say this right now: as much as I get the mantra of ‘On I Go’, a reclamation of time and deliberate pacing that is the explicit retort to everything I just said, the song feels lumpy, underwritten, and leaves the project feeling very open-ended… which given her release schedule is absolutely anticlimatic, which can do a disservice to her strongest moments here.

Which drives me a little nuts, because the best moments here are pretty damn incredible, and let’s start with the production and instrumentation. I’ll admit I’m not always the biggest fan of staccato eclectic grooves overcompensating for lack of strong melody - it’s one of the reasons I don’t quite love The Idler Wheel… - but what Fiona Apple does across the piano in terms of weird progressions off the jagged drumwork is just goddamn remarkable. I love how the guitar curdles behind the arpeggiated moments on ‘Shameika’, and how the chord punctuation on the hook is ever so slightly off which reinforces the crack in adolescence confidence. I love the sardonic rejoinders of bass playing off the drumwork on the title track which adds just enough restrained tension to start breaking through, which is a great lead-in to ‘Under The Table’ with its solemn organs spiked by the jaunty pianos, or how the bass sounds so playful building into the soulful intensity around ‘Heavy Balloon’, which becomes even more pronounced on the sultry patter of ‘Cosmonauts’, probably the most conventionally accessible song here with the fuller guitars, likely because Fiona Apple originally intended it for Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 of all things - thank god it wasn’t included to that! But that’s not counting the songs where the melody is stripped down to her voice and clattering drums where she becomes the focal point in a mix where you’re still keenly aware of the room because of pickups that feel more live and vocals not obviously touched up - and yet as someone who doesn’t always get on-board with this, I was shocked how much Fiona Apple’s command of mantras and cadence was so striking! I used the word ‘patter’ before and it’s so applicable in how not only can she lock into a rhythm but also switch into something choppier and it sound just fractured enough to make her point while not breaking the flow of the song: ‘Relay’ being the most obvious example, but it’s as true with ‘Newspaper’ and especially two with the stellar one-two punch of ‘For You’ and ‘Drumset’, the latter of which might be one of the most catchy things I’ve heard all year!

Now that being said, I’ve seem some criticisms of the mantra structure and placement on this project - that they become a focal point without much development or can run long on songs that don’t feel fully composed - and I’m a little torn on this, because on the one hand, you can say they absolutely have a place in the meditative moments of tension that unspool in strange or unorthodox ways, or feel more essential to the song’s overall point. ‘Relay’, for instance, is all about the cycle of abuse and how much she grapples with constructive outlets for her fury at unjust power structures that elevate entitled assholes, where to stay sane by the end of the track she is the one to break the cycle. Similar to the awkward undercurrent on ‘Under The Table’ where she’s prodding at that disruptive nerve at the elegant party listening to more entitled assholes, or how ‘Newspaper’ highlights the lingering tension between her and her ex’s current partner where she’s got a lot of conflicted emotions and maybe even a connection she wants to nurture, but has to stew in her own thoughts instead… but on the flipside, as I already brought up, the mantra in ‘On I Go’ is its point and just winds up feeling unresolved. And hell, as much as I like a lot of the sentiments on the verses of the title track where she has to break out of her own insecurities and self-destructive impulses to run free - and the Kate Bush reference is perfect here - the hook does start to feel a bit stale by the end. And now that we’re at the content, if I do have a criticism, it’s that many of these arcs feel familiar for Fiona Apple, even if the thematic core is a little different; it’s not an album that surprises or shocks me in its revelations and focus, which is where you’d think the subject matter would come closer to matching the more experimental side of the production.

But that’s not saying the content isn’t potent - again, in my opinion it’s the biggest draw for the project especially in striking the balance between being self-critical and examining the rifts people drive between each other, driven off of arrogance and pride and insecurity and depression, and like always, there’s a measured hand in the framing. And there’s something almost childlike in how Fiona Apple careens through these stories with exuberance… but more than enough maturity and forethought to wryly muse on them now. I like how ‘Shameika’ showed the titular character remark how Apple had ‘potential’, that all the projection of strength could become more potent, and following it with the title track showed just how far she’d need to buck against every projection upon her to find that freedom, and how just spurring her own backlash was still be done because of them - to quote Jeff Winger from the pilot of Community, ‘either way, they win’. But what’s fascinating is that she doesn’t just place herself in a disconnected void - she craves that empathetic connection, and that takes us to songs like ‘Ladies’ and ‘Newspaper’, where she sees how men and society at large is built to perpetuate conflict between them instead of fostering friendship and strength. But it’s not an automatic ‘men are trash’ narrative here either - ‘Rack Of His’ is pretty scathing in highlighting how disposable guys can treat relationships in comparison with their passions and she spares no words in her furious callout on ‘For Her’, the darkest moment on the album in both highlighting his callous behaviour and the women struggling to live in that system… but then it’s followed by ‘Drumset’, where she knows guys lie to salvage their own ego and she has to contextualize her own abandonment issues, and she knows some of it just isn’t rational. Look at ‘Cosmonauts’, which is a musing on monogamy that opens with the frustrated line ‘whatever you do it’s gonna be wrong’… and yet it’s on a song that’s all about the challenge to make something work. Hell, even on ‘For Her’ you have lines like ‘you should know, but you don’t know what you did’, highlighting how men in that system are not really confronted with the consequences of their actions because they’re rarely held to account - if the bolt cutters are taken to anything, it’s to institutional patriarchy that breaks sisterhood and perpetuates a battle of the sexes, especially when love gets messy and compromises everything, where the freedom comes to being allowed to move, both internally and externally.

But as a whole for the album… I’d argue this is a trickier album to assess beyond just pure unadulterated praise. It’s richly nuanced but raw, fractured but thematically solid, hitting as hard as she ever has but inconsistent in its impact. It disposes of a lot of the subtlety I loved in her first two projects, but might be better for it? Again, it’s a project that’s potent in its explicit imperfections, and that won’t hit everyone in the same way - that’s the risk you run with a less composed approach. And again, it’s not like Fiona Apple is the first nor only artist to touch this territory, and I found myself wishing the snapshots of unique brilliance were more consistent. As such, this is a very strong 8/10 and a high recommendation for an excellent album - it’s absolutely an album that grows on you and it’s worth a lot of listens, and as for hype… well I’ll quote the song I liked the least on the album: ‘I only move to move’. It’s not saying she doesn’t move, but she’s deliberate when she does so - worth thinking about, that’s all I’m saying.