The conveyance of depression and anger through voice cracks and bends bring out the depth of songs such as “Relay” and “Heavy Balloon.” She does not try to sing every note with pure tone and precision, but rather allows her emotional interpretation to take the lead, leaving listeners with a gash in their heart from the cutting pain and resolution her timber holds.
Apple’s songwriting is dense and jarring, but it's her vocal interpretation that allows each line to land with bone-splitting force. The voice, despite what was said above, however, does not play second fiddle during the course of this album. Various other techniques, from raspy, growling notes to the off-kilter layering of vocal tracks, pepper the album, adding excitement and unexpectantly within the production that keeps emotions running high. Shrill pops over dissonant percussion close the opening track “I Want You To Love Me,” creating a tense yet hollow atmosphere that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. For as brilliant as Fetch the Bolt Cutters is-perhaps her most innovative recording to date-my guess is that the next album goes up as loud as 11.Her fifth studio album since her debut in 1996, Fetch The Bolt Cutters embraces a raw and emotionally vulnerable Apple, supplementing her torturous voice with jarring yet soothing percussion and piano to create an atmosphere as potent as anything you’ll ever encounter.įiona Apple is a compositional savant, and the stripped-back, DIY approach to instrumentation within Fetch The Bolt Cutters helps to slip into the deepest crevices of our emotional baggage and unzip it open, letting our emotions come sweeping over us as we are pulled into the music.Īpple treats her voice as simply another instrument in the arrangement, and this allows her to utilize it in ways it cannot be when thrust into the spotlight. Starting with opener “I Want You to Love Me” and Apple’s need for desire on her own terms, you sense that her seclusion is over, and that, even though her home and interior life was the most magical muse of Bolt Cutters, it’s time to tread alongside real tornadoes, not just the ones of her making.
Into this mess-into this voice that is deeper and raspier now, save for a few happily creaky falsettos and false starts that are part of Bolt Cutters ’ legend-comes everything from the gloriously self-satisfied and celebratory (“I spread like strawberries / I climb like peas and beans” on “Heavy Balloon”) to the blameful and shameful who bullied her (“Shameika”), to the “It girls…comparing the way I was to the way she was” on the title track.
So, too, is the weird solace of the spooky “Newspaper,” the thumbed and thrummed spacey blues and zig-zagging backing voices of “Cosmonauts” Clanking noises, dogs barking, incessant tapping, and shoe shuffles are all a part of Bolt Cutters ’ maelstrom.
Fetch the bolt cutters series#
Everything about Fetch comes across like a series of trailed off and on again conversations and asides made while people prepare dinner. Recorded all over her Venice Beach house with contributions from drummer Amy Wood, model/actress Cara Delevingne, Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno-to say nothing of her five dogs-the album sounds lived-in, and yelled at. Titled for a chilly line Gillian Anderson delivers in the British police drama The Fall, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is as cold as it is overheated, as vibrant as it is humble, as noisily rhythmic as it is solemn, and as set-back and alone as it is welcoming of friends and pets. Only this time, the self is not the wounded, angry bird of Apple’s past-but rather someone set to prove her more supple nature, the trauma of familiars that plague her, and a penchant for banging things around. For the famously secluded Fiona Apple to drop Fetch the Bolt Cutters during our present day pandemic is like breathing into her own thought bubble a version of Love in the Time of Cholera, observing the confused, disgusted, and lonely yearnings and conversational asides of its subjects while painting an equally stressed, yet resilient, portrait of the self.
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