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Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the fifth studio album by American singer Fiona Apple. It was released on April 17, 2020, and is Apple's first release in nearly eight years, since The Idler Wheel... in 2012. The album received widespread critical acclaim upon its release.
Background and recording
In 2012, Apple began conceptualising a new album, considering a concept album based on her home in Venice Beach or the Pando in Utah. In 2015, she began recording the album with bassist Sebastian Steinberg, drummer Amy Aileen Wood and guitarist Davíd Garza.
They began recording in Apple's Venice Beach home studio, using home-made percussive objects and chanting as they marched around the house. They spent three weeks at the Sonic Ranch studio in rural Texas, with little success. Upon returning to Venice Beach, they began making progress, with Apple recording long takes consisting of instruments being hit against surfaces and objects. Apple's vocals were unedited, and the album developed a highly percussive sound.
By July 2019, Apple had begun mixing the album. In September, the process began to slow down, with Apple developing doubts about the album. At this time, the artist first mentioned work on her new project in an interview with Vulture, explaining that she was still working hard on her next album which should have been released "a million years ago" and was hoping to put it out in 2020. She also admitted to being reclusive due to ongoing recording sessions at her Venice Beach house.
In January 2020, she played the mixes to her band members, whose positive response brought Apple back on track. In an interview that month, she said that the album process was in its final stages, with the only things left being "artwork and stuff". On March 9, 2020, she revealed that she had finished recording, making the announcement in sign language.
Music and lyrics
The album's sound is percussive and raw. Songs feature looped sections, and sudden tempo changes. Apple's long-time bassist Sebastian Steinberg compared the album to Apple's 2012 song "Hot Knife", describing it as "very raw and unslick". Lyrically, Apple identified its main theme as "not being afraid to speak". She also explores her complex social relationships with other women.
User Album Review
Somewhere in the cosmic dust of the internet, there’s a video of Fiona Apple dancing at home with her dog. She’s all in red with her hair casually pulled back, doing a jaunty little Newsies jig that turns into a sort of interpretative Martha Graham kick-sprawl on the floor; the dog, a glossy black mutt, leaps and scrabbles around her, nearly deranged with Big Canine Energy.
It’s sweet and strange and a little bit unnerving (is Apple’s arm about to get ripped out of its socket? Stay tuned!), and all over in about a minute. It also has just over 100,000 views, which might seem unusually high for an artist who hasn’t released an album in nearly eight years, or a charting single in more than 20; one who rarely goes to industry events and cultivates press only in the most eccentric intermittent way, occasionally calling up journalists she finds online to chat.
And yet the Cult of Fiona endures — perhaps because there was no artist quite like her when she first emerged as a lemur-eyed, wildly precocious 18-year-old with the contained supernova of 1996’s Tidal, and there hasn’t really been another one since. But if the Sullen Girl who stood in front of an audience of millions at the 1997 VMAs and flatly declared “This world is bulls---” is some two decades older and wiser now, there is nothing diminished about the fierceness of her presence on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, an album that feels both playful and urgent, melodic and chaotic, expansive and crammed with tiny definitive details.
“I’ve waited many years/Every print I’ve left upon the track has led me here,” she coos over swooping arpeggios and a crisp, jittery backbeat on the torch-song opener “I Want You to Love Me," holding the note on every “you” in the song’s climbing chorus like a happy hostage. “Shameika” segues into a giddy, galloping piano stomp, threaded through with casual Latin hymnals and a big-bang kick drum; “Under the Table” begins with a sly dinner-party protest before descending into a joyful chaos of rolling percussion and singing-in-the-round. “Evil is a Relay Sport,” with its tightly wound couplets about resentment and representation and hate for hate’s sake, could be political or it could be personal; it could also just be a very apt description of social media.
The syncopated title track comes on clanging with kitchen-sink instruments and tricky time signatures, somewhere between sparse cabaret and spoken word; her voice dips low and grows hoarse over “Heavy Balloon,” singing of loss and bottomless bottoms. You could say that heaviness has always been Apple’s lane, and it's true there’s not a lot here that passes for anything breezy, let alone radio-ready.
But Fetch, which blossoms more and more with each listen, feels giddy too; high on romance and rhythm and the surreal gift of being alive: “Blast the music/bang it, bite it, bruise it,” she commands in the album’s first thunderous moments. “Whenever you want to begin, begin/We don’t have to go back to where we’ve been.” And that does seem to capture, in its own confounding, wonderful way, exactly what she's done for more than two decades now: looked far ahead, and dragged the rest of us — or at least those lucky enough and willing to hang on — along. A–
SOURCE: https://ew.com/music/music-reviews/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters-album-review/
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