FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters
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I wanted to cover…
PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Apple
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters for Vinyl Corner because it is a very recent treat, and not only is it one of this year’s best albums, but it might be one of the most-regarded albums of the past decade! It is an exceptional release, and it followed on from 2012’s The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, frequently abridged as The Idler Wheel... I don’t think there was any expectation as to what Fiona Apple’s fifth studio would sound like. I have been a fan since the 1990s, and I remember when her debut album, Tidal, arrived in 1996. Tracks like Shadowboxer, and Criminal were big when I was in high school, and I have followed her career since then. With remarkable albums like When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right arriving in 1999, and Extraordinary Machine coming along in 2005, there are sizeable gaps between records but, when they do arrive, they are better than anything out there!
Every Fiona Apple album is an event and something that seems to transcend music itself. In the case of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, that is especially true! It is a remarkable album that is very experimental and uses percussion like never before. Apple uses objects to create various sounds, and I love how bold and original her compositions are. If her earliest music relief on piano and traditional instruments, Fetch the Bolt Cutters makes use of unusual objects and unique sounds to give the songs something truly special and emotional. According to Wikipedia, ”the album explores freedom from oppression; Apple identified its core message as: "Fetch the fucking bolt cutters and get yourself out of the situation you're in". The title, a quote from TV series The Fall, reflects this idea. The album also discusses Apple's complex relationships with other women and other personal experiences, including bullying and sexual assault. It has nevertheless been referred to as Apple's most humorous album”. The album holds a near-perfect score on Metacritic, and it is one of the most beloved albums from recent memory. The vinyl edition brings the incredible sounds and rich vocals fully to life, and I have been listening to songs from the album since its release on 17th April. The fact that it was released early into lockdown was a big move! Apple could have waited until later this year to bring it out, but the fact that she recorded a lot at her house and didn’t feel the need to hold it back provided something staggering whilst we were all quite scared and unsure.
PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Apple
Now, five months or so down the line, the album still moves the senses, and one discovers new things from various songs. I especially love Shameika, Under the Table, and Newspaper, and there is not a wasted moment or second that is anything less than stunning across the thirteen tracks! It is a world-class album, and it shows that Apple gets better with each release. It makes one wonder just how far she can go and what will come next! I will bring in some reviews in a second, but I recommend that you put an order in for Fetch the Bolt Cutters - and this is what Rough Trade had to say about it:
“The unhurried artist’s first studio album in eight years is astonishing, intimate and demonstrates a refusal to be silenced. The Apple of 2020 is astonishing; as if she has returned to reinvent sound – the rhythms pleasing, but counter, and unusual. On the title track she half-sings over a makeshift orchestra of kitchen implements, dog bark and cat yowl. The beat on Kick Me Under the Table has a seething back-and-forth pace; the extraordinary For Her beds double Dutch skipping rope rhythms beneath a chorus of female voices.
It’s striking how intimate Apple’s voice sounds here – half-conversational, half-self-mutters, allowing every scuff, breath and feral yelp. She is at her most familiar on Ladies, hollering over a soulful backdrop, chewing her own voice like tobacco, then letting it take sweet, sudden flight.
Fetch The Bolt Cutters is full of visceral, jittery, wonderfully imperfect performances that make the album feel like a dreamlike concert at Largo. It features contributions from Davíd Garza, Sebastian Steinberg, and Amy Aileen Wood”.
If you have not heard Fetch the Bolt Cutters, then I suggest you do, and you will want to grab it on vinyl! As I said, the album has received staggering reviews, and I will end with a couple of them. Apple has provided interviews around the release of the album, and I wanted to source from an interview she gave to NPR in April:
“What do you see as the thing you need to be liberated from?
The ideas that I had about myself — that on some level I'll always have. Just everything from when you're growing up, everything that everybody says to you about you that you believe, and of course for me that branches out into adulthood, with my career. But I really wasn't thinking about my career and how I've been portrayed in the media or anything about that, I was just thinking about things that have been said to me personally in my life that I took to heart that I shouldn't have; the way that I think that I have internalized a lot of the things that were said to me, believed them and then as a result, hidden myself away or shut myself up. As much as I don't think that I'm known for being someone who keeps quiet about things, I have really kept quiet about a lot of things. There's a lot to say, and I've kept quiet about some of it.
I feel like the songs on this album, they're not just about seizing the chance to speak, they're also about wanting people to really hear you. For the past couple years, there's been this more honest conversation in this country about believing women when they do speak up, and I'm wondering if that's also what you're getting at in this album?
Well, I mean, it's hopefully what I'm getting at with everything that I do. The fact is — and it's a fact — if a woman, or a man, goes public with some kind of abuse, they're not doing it for attention. There's no reason that people will lie about that. They know what they're getting into. We know, as much as we've given women more of a space to speak and be believed, there's still all the trolls and all the little bros that come back and beat them down as much as they can. As much as we know that when we speak, more people will be afraid to say "Screw you, you're a liar," people aren't so keen to do that right now; there still is a huge backlash and there's a lot of risk in speaking up. And anybody who would think that a woman would get up and put herself in that position for attention is just insane and I would like to punch them in their head 43 times.
I read this album was almost entirely recorded in your house, and this is a house, as you've mentioned, that you barely left over the past several years. So I was just wondering: Does quarantine life feel all that different from life before?
No, it doesn't. Well actually, it does feel a little bit different because everything is always different when you're told that you can't leave. I was always able to leave before, and I chose not to. And funny enough, right when I'm like "I'm fetching the bolt cutters! I'm gonna leave this house!" It's like "Nope! No you're not!"
PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Apple
Which goes back to another reason why I did the album in this house — and this is another point where I'm going to sound a little bit nuts. This house is alive to me. The fact is, this house was here when I needed a place to go. When I moved here, I needed a place to go and I needed a place to go so that I could bring my dog, Janet, where she would have some place to run around and I needed a place fast. And this place just opened up like right when I needed it”.
Although a lot of the material on Fetch the Bolt Cutters is upbeat and hopeful, there are these angrier moments that really knock you back. It is such a powerful record, and Apple’s incredible use of language helps imprint the songs in the memory. I will get to some reviews soon but, just now, I want to grab a section from an interview Apple gave to The New York Times, and that sense of anger and directness was brought up:
“Some of the new material was strikingly angry. The cathartic “For Her” builds to Apple hollering, “Good mornin’! Good mornin’ / You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” The song had grown out of a recording session the band held shortly after the nomination hearings of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; like many women, Apple felt scalded with rage about survivors of sexual violence being disbelieved. The title track came to her later; a meditation on feeling ostracized, it jumps between lucidity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple muses, “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend / I thought it was, then— / But it wasn’t, it wasn’t genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,” her voice doubles, harmonies turning into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden “meow” sound. In the final moments, dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever happens, whatever happens.”
Partway through, she sings, “I thought that being blacklisted would be grist for the mill.” She improvised the line while recording; she knew that it was good, because it was embarrassing. “It sounds bitter,” she said. The song isn’t entirely despairing, though. The next line makes an impassioned allusion to a song by Kate Bush, one of Apple’s earliest musical heroines: “I need to run up that hill / I will, I will, I will”.
If you still need convincing to get the album, then I want to bring in some typical reviews. There is no doubting that the media has been hit and awed by this missile of an album that is going to be hard to equal anytime soon! When they stepped up to assess Fetch the Bolt Cutters, this is what The Times offered:
“For its musical construction alone Fetch the Bolt Cutters is remarkable. A riot of percussion clatters and rattles against Apple’s multitracked voice as it jumps from sweet harmonies, to playground chants, to syncopated raps, sometimes within the same song. The soulful Ladies starts with a slow, funky breakbeat and Apple’s voice repeating “ladies” as if calling a group of women to order before singing, with rhythmic dexterity: “There’s a dress in the closet, don’t get rid of it, you look good in it, I didn’t fit in it, it was never mine, it belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine, she left it behind with a note, one line, it said: ‘I don’t know if I’m coming across, but I’m really trying.’” Concerning “yet another woman to whom I won’t get through”, Ladies is like a novel about female miscommunication in verse.
Clear lines are embedded in songs with unclear meanings. “Good morning! Good morning! You raped me in the same bed your daughter slept in,” Apple sings, in a raucous blues holler, on For Her. Fetch the Bolt Cutters — featuring one Cara Delevingne on backing vocals — has Apple remembering the days when she compared herself with the popular, seemingly more stable girls. “I hadn’t found my own voice yet,” she sings, “so all I could hear was the noise that people make when they don’t know shit . . . but I didn’t know that yet.” Then there is Kick Me Under the Table: “I would beg to disagree, but begging disagrees with me.”
Fetch the Bolt Cutters seems like Apple’s attempt to make sense of early fame, her difficulty in making friends with other women, past love affairs — she said spending a night with her former boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson and his fellow director Quentin Tarantino talking about how great they were was enough to put her off cocaine forever — and depression. Then again, I might be entirely wrong. Not that it matters. This album is deep enough for multiple interpretations while being so authentic to its creator’s vision, you want to unpeel its layers and reveal the core. It is like nothing else you will hear this year”.
I will come back to including slightly older records in Vinyl Corner in future editions, but I have been so mesmerised by Fiona Apple’s fifth studio album, that I was compelled to include it. Both sides of the Atlantic have been blown away by an album of immense potency.
This is what Pitchfork wrote when they awarded the album a perfect ten:
“She calls men out for refusing to show weakness, for treating their wives badly, for needing women to clean up their messes. Where The Idler Wheel explored a form of self-interrogation—“I’m too hard to know,” she crooned—on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she unapologetically indicts the world around her. And she rejects its oppressive logic in every note. The very sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters dismantles patriarchal ideas: professionalism, smoothness, competition, perfection—aesthetic standards that are tools of capitalism, used to warp our senses of self. Where someone else might erase a mistake—“Oh fuck it!” she chuckles on “On I Go”—she leaves it in. Where someone might put a bridge, she puts clatter. Where she once sang, “Hunger hurts but starving works,” here, in the devouring chorus of “Heavy Balloon,” she screams: “I spread like strawberries/I climb like peas and beans.” There is nothing top-down about the sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “She wanted to start from the ground,” her guitarist David Garza told The New Yorker. “For her, the ground is rhythm.”
There’s considerable power in how Apple entertains so many of these wild, inexhaustible impulses. “Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you shush me!” she chips back on “Under the Table.” She will not be silenced. That’s patently clear from the start of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. In gnarled breaths on its opening song—feet on the ground and mind as her might—Apple articulates exactly what she wants: “Blast the music! Bang it! Bite it! Bruise it!” It’s not pretty. It’s free”.
There are many reasons why you need to own Fetch the Bolt Cutters, but I think the most compelling one is the reactions you will have when listening to the tracks. It is almost like the listener is there alongside Apple as she records the music! Fetch the Bolt Cutters is such a remarkable listen and, in the opinion of many people, it is…
ONE of the greatest albums ever released.