Critics are already declaring Fiona Apple's 'Fetch the Bolt Cutters' the album of the year
It’s only April, but music critics are already declaring Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters the best album of 2020. The reclusive singer-songwriter — who has embarked on a willfully uncommercial and sporadic career since her breakthrough at age 18 with 1996’s Tidal — dropped her first album since 2012 on Friday, and the highly anticipated release has received unanimously rapturous reviews.
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters Is Raw, Introspective and Everything We Need Out of a Fiona Apple Album,” says Time. “Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters Is the Album She Deserved to Make All Along,” says Vulture. “Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters Is a Blistering, Emotional Triumph,” raves USA Today. “Fiona Apple’s Stunningly Intimate New Album Makes a Bold Show of Unprettiness,” proclaims the Los Angeles Times. “Fiona Apple Makes Defiance Sound Exhilarating on Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” says the Boston Globe. And those are just the publications’ headlines.
Many of Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ reviews acknowledge the eerie — but welcome — timing of an artist known for being intensely private and introspective releasing an album in the middle of a nationwide lockdown. Maura Johnston of the Boston Globe calls Fetch “an ideal album for this decisively odd moment,” and Spin’s John Paul Bullock calls the record, which was almost entirely recorded at Apple’s house, as “a quarantine LP that was made before we were all in quarantine” — a “product of cabin fever” that “occasionally feels claustrophobic,” but is “an undeniably fascinating and complex collection of songs.”
“The reclusive artist’s fifth record, released with the world at a safe distance, couldn’t have come at a better time,” declares The Independent’s Alexandra Pollard in her five-star review. “Given the circumstances we find ourselves under, it is welcome to receive an album that rewards repeated listening,” agrees The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick. The L.A. Times’ Mikael Wood says: “The result of Apple’s self-imposed social distancing is the stunning intimacy of the material here — a rich text to scour in quarantine.”
And Time’s Judy Berman muses: “Apple couldn’t have known when she quoted the line [“fetch the bolt cutters”], first uttered by Gillian Anderson in the BBC crime drama The Fall, that she’d be releasing the record into a world on house arrest. But Apple has always been spookily prescient about the mood of the culture, magnifying her own internal landscape until it starts to look like a near-future map of the universe. … You bet Fiona Apple knows what it’s like to be bouncing off the walls of your bedroom — and your skull — with too much time to second-guess every choice you’ve ever made. How lucky for listeners that her unsparing introspection possesses the alchemical power to make us feel less alone in ours.”
However, while Apple’s latest work is proclaimed brilliant by all, music journalists concede that it is hardly an easy listen. Many note Apple’s triggering lyrics dealing with sexual assault, bullying, internalized misogyny, and depression (The Telegraph calls the album “a masterpiece for the #MeToo era”) as well as her almost total disregard for conventional songwriting.
“Her idiosyncratic song structures, full of sudden stops and lurching tempo changes, adhere to logic only she could explain, which forces you to listen as attentively as though a dear friend were bending your ear,” explains the L.A. Times. In a rare 10-out-of-10 review for Pitchfork, Jenn Pelly describes the record as “unbound, a wildstyle symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it. …It contains practically no conventional pop forms. Taken together, the notes of its found percussion and rattling blues are liberationist.”
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Time elaborates: “The record’s conversational tone, manifested in Apple’s talky delivery as well as in lyrics that scan as prose more often than poetry, creates a rare intimacy. And it’s echoed in compositions defined by their rough edges: hand claps; a cappella passages; sudden shifts in tempo; vocals that alternate ragged whispers, attenuated moans and bracing falsetto with her unmistakable throaty croon. Ambient sounds — the dogs barking, people talking — as well as seconds of near silence, made their way into the mix. As beautiful as the melodies and the epiphanies they carry often are, the songs are not what you would call ‘pretty.’”
Variety’s Chris Willman realizes that there’s no “guarantee that [this album will] be, like, popular; much of the material is challenging on first listen, and smoothness is a quality Apple consigns to criminals, not her own middle-period work.” However, he quickly adds, “But damn, it’s good, in a rich and deep way that’ll have you reaching for headphones and a lyric sheet to rediscover different choice morsels in the coming weeks or months of this shared lockdown. It’s a musical food bank unto itself.”
The Irish Times’ Tony Clayton-Lea concurs. “There is nothing close to easy listening on Fiona Apple’s new album,” he writes, “but that’s par for the course for one of the most intriguing songwriters of the past 25 years. … The end result is a bracing collection of songs that, perhaps, won’t suit some radio playlists but that, in a cultural sense, settle satisfactorily alongside more contemporary female songwriters such as Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Kesha and Lorde. If 25 years ago there were ever thoughts of a precocious Fiona Apple of being ahead of her time, then right now seems a perfect point for Fetch the Bolt Cutters to arrive.”
Overall, the consensus among fawning music critics is that Fetch the Bolt Cutters has been worth the wait, and is well worth listeners’ time and effort. USA Today calls it “a dense and richly poetic masterpiece from one of music's best modern storytellers.” Vulture’s Craig Jenkins calls it “free and uncompromising, the kind of art [Apple] has been positioning herself to make all along” and a “volcanic expurgation of the spirit, a dance along the dividing line between joy and pain.” And Variety praises the record’s “luxuriant-feeling production design,” describing it as “a happy thing to get lost and found in. …It’s the kind of work where you come away thinking Apple is just like you and also 10 times more brilliant than you — and a little exhausting, sure, but with a creative ingenuity that’s inexhaustible in the way it draws you back in to hit ‘play’ every time the last notes sound. ... It may be way early to say it’s the most satisfying album of the year, but if there are any more to come along this good, 2020 is not going to feel like such a waste of time after all.”
Listen to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters below:
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