JON PARELES Traumas and obstacles confront Fiona Apple all the way through “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” It’s her first album since 2012 and by far her noisiest one, aimed not for radio or for inoffensively curated singer-songwriter playlists — but for catharsis. Apple has never been timid; even on her 1996 debut album, released when she was a teenager, her songs explored psychological minefields and spared no one. But “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is daring in a new way, scrambling and shattering the pop-song structures that once grounded her.Apple’s new songs face down both past and present injuries: bullying, sexual assault, destructive mind games, romantic debacles, her own fears and compulsions and the people who have taken advantage of them. At times it’s a meta-album, grappling with the insecurities that prolonged its own recording process; “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is only her fifth release. More often, it’s an artfully unguarded anthology of one woman’s ongoing battles against depression, mendacious lovers and toxic memories, offered not with self-pity but with self-awareness and flickers of rage. It’s no wonder Apple ends up growling and walloping things.[embedded content]Percussion defines the sound of the album: standard drum kits, handclaps, foot-stomps and a warehouse full of accessories from sleigh bells and wood blocks to what sound like giant, booming parade bass drums. Apple has toyed with percussion-centered arrangements before, in songs like “Daredevil” from “The Idler Wheel…,” but on “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she commits.Yes, vestiges of Apple as a meticulously presented, piano-playing singer-songwriter are still there, particularly in the album’s opening songs. And whether she’s cooing with sarcastic solicitousness or rasping close to a scream, she articulates every word clearly, emoting but never losing control. But her piano recedes and sometimes disappears over the course of the album, while clatters, clanks and thuds throng around her.Meanwhile, she warps the expectations of verse-chorus-verse forms, talk-singing or chanting as long as she wishes, sometimes letting choruses of overdubbed Fionas — dulcet ones, jabbering ones — completely hijack her tunes. Some people may hear those tangents as self-indulgence, but I hear them as freedom.WESLEY MORRIS So do I, Jon. She sounds let all the way out. But I have to tell you guys that whatever I’m typing today about this album is raw, unprocessed (I’ve listened only twice) and certain to be riddled with typos — because my hands are shaking. LINDSAY ZOLADZ First of all, I would like to thank Fiona Apple, the patron saint of not leaving the house, for dropping such a rich, itchy record in the middle (hopefully?) of our communal quarantine. “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long” is definitely a lyric I will be muttering to myself with increasing urgency in the coming weeks.I am floored by this record. I hear freedom, too. These songs make some breathtaking hairpin turns, like the sudden sweep into the gorgeous, plinking chorus of “I Want You to Love Me” that ultimately splinters into wild yelps that, to my ears, conjure Yoko Ono. It’s the first glaring indicator that the rest of these songs are not going to conform to patriarchal ideas of propriety — most of the time they seem to be aiming to directly defy them.One of the album’s unifying themes is women and Apple’s relationships with them, not in a rah-rah #empowerment sense but in a much more complicated and often very raw manner. A standout is “Shameika,” named for a schoolmate of Apple’s who — in a eureka moment for the artist that she admits Shameika probably doesn’t remember — told our antsy, tortured, self-doubting future songwriter that she “had potential.” The verses are chaotic torrents of piano and percussion, and then the world suddenly stops as Apple sings, in an almost hammy, Elton John kind of way, “But … Shameika said I had potential.”This record is so casually wise about formative trauma and the ways our early experiences ripple outward, not just in our own lives but in those closest to us: “Evil is a relay sport when the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” My therapist would love this album. More
