Music Review: Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Isobel Helme reviews Fiona Apple’s chart-topping fifth album.
Fiona Apple’s fifth album is unbeatable. This is a fact universally agreed; Fetch the Bolt Cutters earned a score of ten from Pitchfork (its first since Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ten years ago), and at the time of writing is the highest-rated album of all time on Metacritic. Less Sad Girl than before, Apple is more angry, funny, witty, defiant girl. In an interview with the New Yorker, Apple described the album’s overarching message as being the importance of “not being afraid to speak”, which she defined further in Vulture as being about “breaking out of whatever prison you’ve allowed yourself to live in […] fetch the fucking bolt cutters and get yourself out of the situation you’re in”.
It is not only the move from melancholia to resilience that sets this album apart from its predecessors. Surprising for an artist renowned for her piano-playing, the sound is overwhelmingly percussive. One would be hard pressed to come up with another album that relies on the experimental noise of a metal butterfly found outside a school and the bones of a deceased pet dog. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan suggests that this cacophony “plays as a wild, feverish attempt to mirror the chaos that goes on in the human mind when it’s at its most overheated.” The barking heard throughout the album does not in fact come from poor Janet’s remains, but from both Apple and Cara Delevingne’s dogs (Delevingne provides backing vocals on the title song).
It would be a disservice to both Apple and the album to attempt to categorise it as one thing or another. It transcends genre and theme; it is simultaneously side-splittingly funny, devastatingly sad, and hugely critical of society and those who have affected her, for better or for worse. Her targets range from Shameika, a middle-school classmate who told Apple that she “had potential”, to Brett Kavanaugh and the #MeToo movement. The album explores the way women are treated and the way they treat each other; according to Apple, the album “is a lot of not letting men pit us against each other or keep us separate from each other so they can control the message”. We are all too used to songs about despising an ex’s new partner; future feminist anthem “Ladies” (“There’s a dress in the closet / Don’t get rid of it, you’d look good in it”) offers a lesser-seen view of how we should treat each other, but ends with a lamenting “Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through”.
Perhaps Fetch the Bolt Cutters is best described as unconcerned. No one really knows what “I spread like strawberries / I climb like peas and beans” means, and nor did Apple intend us to. Both the lyrics and the sound are experimental. She’s a not-a-singer singer, explaining “I’ve stopped trying to be a singer, actually. I have fun with my voice, but I’m not trying to make it pretty all the time. I’m not trying to convince anybody I’m a singer”. She hiccups, improvises, and mutters her way along, interrupting herself with blindsiding lines such as “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”. Apple has previously spoken of her own experience with sexual assault, being raped at the age of 12. The first thing that she did after the event was pray for her attacker.
This is the fifth album of a 24-year long career - Fiona Apple only speaks when she has something to say. She is unconcerned with gloss and convention, and instead erupts with an uncontrolled ferocity as yet unseen. The whole album is a resounding middle finger up to the aspects of society that have long dictated what she should say and do. But the album is not angry. It is an act of solidarity and of resilience. As she says on “Under The Table”, “Kick me under the table all you want / I won’t shut up”.