Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters review – a glorious eruption
Fiona Apple's New Album Roars With the Mess of Life
The Liberation of Fiona Apple
Pitchfork just gave Fiona Apple their first perfect score in almost a decade
The first time I heard Fiona Apple, all she had to say for herself was that she’d been a bad, bad girl: “Heaven help me for the way I am / Save me from these evil deeds before I get them done.” “Criminal” sounded like the pop hit it became in the 1990s, an introduction not to a person but to a persona.
The manufactured image (wary chanteuse for that heroin chic micromoment) was subverted by the artist’s innate ability: that beyond-her-years contralto, lyrics that unwound with an unpredictable logic. Her debut, Tidal, released in 1996, is juvenilia—she was 19!—and if Apple has spent the ensuing years racing away from that persona, she’ll never outrun it, nor should she wish to. At her most creatively fertile, Joni Mitchell (it’s required when talking about a genius woman musician to summon her) released a masterpiece a year from 1974 to 1977. Apple is no less urgent or searching, but she needs time. Three years after Tidal, there was When the Pawn… (the full title a long poem), then 2005’s Extraordinary Machine, then 2012’s The Idler Wheel… (the full title is 23 words), and now, eight years on, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. One cannot chart this rake’s progress by an album’s evolving concerns, because those do not change for her. The albums are soundtracks, with a meaning particular to the person listening. Her fans’ feelings about the work have to do with the moment at which they found it. Because Apple is always reassuringly herself. The jaunty piano, tamed with aplomb; that voice, less sweet with age and maybe the better for it; lyrics that look like middling verse—something my teen self would have inscribed on my history notebook—but delivered with brio. Take “Extraordinary Machine”.
The manufactured image (wary chanteuse for that heroin chic micromoment) was subverted by the artist’s innate ability: that beyond-her-years contralto, lyrics that unwound with an unpredictable logic. Her debut, Tidal, released in 1996, is juvenilia—she was 19!—and if Apple has spent the ensuing years racing away from that persona, she’ll never outrun it, nor should she wish to. At her most creatively fertile, Joni Mitchell (it’s required when talking about a genius woman musician to summon her) released a masterpiece a year from 1974 to 1977. Apple is no less urgent or searching, but she needs time. Three years after Tidal, there was When the Pawn… (the full title a long poem), then 2005’s Extraordinary Machine, then 2012’s The Idler Wheel… (the full title is 23 words), and now, eight years on, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. One cannot chart this rake’s progress by an album’s evolving concerns, because those do not change for her. The albums are soundtracks, with a meaning particular to the person listening. Her fans’ feelings about the work have to do with the moment at which they found it. Because Apple is always reassuringly herself. The jaunty piano, tamed with aplomb; that voice, less sweet with age and maybe the better for it; lyrics that look like middling verse—something my teen self would have inscribed on my history notebook—but delivered with brio. Take “Extraordinary Machine”.
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