Fiona Apple is at large
Let’s pretend every album, before it even intros, is an act of felony. Let’s also pretend I’m a half-decent lawyer, building the defendant’s case from nifty creatures like context, investigation, and maybe even precedent. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Your Honour, is indeed as transcendental as everyone online says. Ms. Apple has come a long way. We were here for her first album, and the one after, and there is growth. There is sufficient evidence that this work has been designed to fit precisely our present moment, by a singer-songwriter operating at the highest level of her craft.”
The defense rests, etcetera.
I do not have enough of these documents to assemble the case that this record will definitely change your life. I regularly mistook Ms. Apple for a part-time actress, and presumed she had pivoted wildly from a decent spell in Hollywood; that she had somehow morphed into Regina Spektor (with whose conversational style her own lyrics share dormitory space) and begun to build a nice little niche for herself in this whole other world. Maybe I clicked a video once, and was adequately impressed by the mania - the way Ms. Apple appears to enjoy sneaking illicit lyrical substances into Wonderland. But I cannot make the case, off of history, that you must drop everything to listen to Fetch the Bolt Cutters. I can only assure you that when you do it will slap you across the face, several times, and more than once you will thank Ms. Apple for it.
She only seems guilty because she doesn’t care what you do with your gavel. The woman who begs you to love her, then so very melodically tells you to go do stuff to yourself, depicts escaping a nasty relationship - maybe a collection of them - as if in a hot-wired van. I imagine this character drives across a countryside, into a city, away from a building with no mirrors. She hasn’t seen or heard herself speak in days, maybe weeks. She’s angry at the man, or men, responsible for it: Harvey Weinstein, President Trump, or (rather) the transplantable monster she’s sure many women before her have hot-wired a van to escape. When Apple does locate a mirror, proof that she’s real, she breaks it soon after - because this is the process of beginning to exist on your own terms.
Talkative lyrics veer left and right along the highway, and the production in the backseat knows to swing just as wildly - but it’s all quite tidily contained. When Apple rambles herself out of the plan slightly, it doesn’t sound like experimental bullshit. An internal monologue that alternates between DIY justice and lingering self-doubt is the point, even, of instrumentation that makes and walks back casual threats.
As soon as she’s assured herself she’s actually a person, Apple starts a revolution at a dinner she doesn’t want to attend. The refrain “That fancy wine won’t put this fire out” is doubled down on by the promise that you can “Kick me under the table all you want/ I won’t shut up, I won’t shut up…”. The breezy way these lines are delivered is single-handedly the most powerful thing I’ve heard all year, and yeah: it’s still only April.
To play Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I know this much, is to listen to a mind reconfigure itself in real time. The playful frolic of ‘Rack of His’ materialises the scene of an ugly argument, without Ms. Apple having to actually scream at anyone. She’s just re-piecing a memory, and you can hear her band sifting through the clues.
Within this cozy hour of catchy schizophrenia, women send each other secret messages, through dresses they’ve left behind in wardrobes. Our escapee laughs, cries, swoons at newfound ‘freedom’. I gather that, “We were cursed the moment that he kissed us,” on ‘Newspaper’, could be a vivid statement of solidarity between women who have ever had to explain trauma. When Apple’s bolt-cutter addresses other women, she’s at her calmest: suddenly easy-going, suddenly reflected. I respect, and humbly adore, how this album masquerades as chill-appropriate, only to serve devastating punchlines that utterly ruin dessert.
Music serves a subconscious purpose for me so I don’t know how often I’ll return in future, to a project with a very specific score to settle. But I am grateful that anything simultaneously this bloodied and sheened, somehow this tangential and lucid, actually exists.
