Fetch The Fiona Apple Cutter!
(A review of Fiona Apple’s latest album Fetch The Bolt Cutters)
by Carlo Rey Lacsamana
Fiona Apple’s feat in her latest album Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a return to the subtleties and the artistic seriousness involved in songwriting and music-making in a time when music is ruthlessly defined by social media pomp and pageantry and of ostentatious market-driven talent shows and the hegemonic mania of YouTube vlogs. Apple reanimates the listeners again with her new album’s attractive eccentricity, startling simplicity, and her uncommon gift for songwriting.
Fetch embodies the developments of that distinct Fiona Apple style and genre punctuated by experimental energy and daringly unusual melodies. The songs in this album are not a far cry from her past albums, they are consistent in their concerns—love, toxic masculinity, womanhood, pain, loss, rebelliousness, endurance, memory, etc.—yet surprisingly intimate and urgent in their lyrics and in the sheer musicality of their composition. One listens to Apple and is persuaded by her faithfulness to her art. An artist concerned with the complexities of music as much as with the complexities of life. But she approaches music (and life) without a readymade coherence and cheap optimism. Rather, the unusualness of her melodies overturns our habits of complacency and comfort and any idea of romantic wholeness. From this comes her unique style. Every song in this album is imposed with rough edges, unpredictable turns of singing, composed in ingeniously simple accompaniments with minimal effects and an absence of fanfare that makes this album an artistically challenging and musically demanding thing to listen in today’s music world dominated by the blinding lights and exasperating noise of American Idol culture.
The first song in the album, I Want You To Love Me, treats the listeners with the fundamentals of music-making. Piano and vocals with minimal inclusion of other instruments. With Apple’s mesmerizing voice, learned piano playing (she was classically trained as a child), and her childish playfulness as she ends the song with a bird-like shrill, I want you to love me is a most memorable ballad.
Apple is one of the most compelling singer-songwriters of our time to express through music the struggle of womanhood in the face of toxic masculinity as she describes in her song For Her:
“Look at how feathered his cocks are
See how seamless his frocks are…
…
Sniff white off a starlet’s breast
Treating his wife like less than a guest
Getting his girl to clean up his mess”
These are slashing lines that cut through the surface and courageously expose the unacknowledged horrors of our culture like rape, condemned in this line of the same song: “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born.”
Part of the violence of this culture is the expectations and the preconceived roles that are unjustly tied to a woman’s identity, much more pronounced today in our social media culture of narcissism and role-playing which tempts everyone to display themselves “like a fucking propaganda brochure.” In the song Fetch The Bolt Cutters also the title album Apple sings:
“While I’d not yet found my bearings
Those it girls hit the ground
Comparing the way I was to the way she was
Sayin’ I’m not stylish enough and I cry too much
And I listened because I hadn’t found my own voice yet
So all I could hear was the noise that
People make when they don’t know shit
But I didn’t know that yet
I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill
When they came around, I would stand real still
A girl can roll her eyes in me and kill
I got the idea I wasn’t real”
In contrast to today’s cultural obsession with flattery and “likes”, the songs in this album as in all of Apple’s oeuvre refuse to be flattered and do not bow to the fashionable; they speak their mind with self-confident gregariousness: “Kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up.” She sings in a discursive style as though trying to push an argument, but she does it not in a pleading or begging way—“I would beg to disagree, but begging disagrees with me.”
Musically, Apple is not an explicit political voice yet the images and stories she relates in her songs are considerably political in their urgency and effect, as in the song Relay:
“Evil is a relay sport
When the one who’s burnt
Turns to pass the torch”
“I resent you for not getting any opposition at all”
Apple confronts the most serious issues with unusual rebelliousness, spinning out devious artistic devices uniquely her own. The hypnotically chant-like song On I Go appropriately characterizes her creatively unpredictable rebelliousness:
“On I go, not toward or away
Up until now it was day, next day
Up until now in a rush to prove
But now I only move to move”
The spirit of On I Go perhaps best represents the kind of musician, artist Fiona Apple is. She moves according to her own rhythm and mood, she knows where her sympathies lie—“My dog and my man and music is my Holy Trinity”—and who her enemies are—“I wasn’t afraid of the bullies / And that just made the bullies worse.” She is like “a good woman in a storm.” She receives love in order to give it back, more intensely, more meaningfully, touchingly rendered in the song Cosmonaut: “You and I will be like a couple of cosmonauts / Except with way more gravity than when we started off.”
All the songs in this album are stamped with a kind of searching for freedom that is “bursting at the seams,” an attempt at breaking out of a system of fashionable stupidity, oppression, and apathy, for as Apple sings, “I’ve been sucking it for so long,” the time has come “to cut the cord.” The release of Apple’s fifth album could not be more timely. The scourge of the ongoing pandemic, the depressing lockdown, and the augmenting repression by populist fascists around the world, Fetch The Bolt Cutters accompanies us to face the brutal realities of these strange times with a refreshing tenderness—the tenderness of serious artistry and the guiding presence of feminine endurance.
Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a hopeful gift to this lonely, struggling world of ours.
Carlo Rey Lacsamana is a Filipino born and raised in Manila, Philippines. Since 2005, he has been living and working in the Tuscan town of Lucca, Italy. He regularly contributes to journals in the Philippines, writing politics, culture, and art. He also writes for a local academic magazine in Tuscany that is published twice a year. His articles have been published in magazines in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Visit his website or follow him on Instagram @carlo_rey_lacsamana.
