“Look at that row of guitar necks / outstretched like legs of Rockettes.” While very funny on its own, it’s a pointed line that casually lances the guitar’s traditional coding as macho and phallic (Prince’s even ejaculated), in line with the album’s nods to female musical geniuses like Kate Bush and, perhaps, Patti Smith. Turns out that it’s instruments that she’s ogling. “Check out that rack of his,” Apple sings in one song over an occultish mellotron, purring as if she’s eyeballing the wait staff of a gender-flipped Hooters. The lasting impression is of a creator who, despite releasing albums infrequently, always hears music, everywhere.Īpple’s light-hearted spirit is unmistakable from the peek-a-boo selfie she chose for the album cover in her new music, her blithe attitude to traditional rock tropes is often laugh-out-loud hilarious. She bangs on a chair, raps on a mini-trampoline, band members stamp their feet. In the polyphonic chorus of “Drumset,” she makes an organ feel like a dial tone the clatter of “Relay” is sprinkled with dog yelps and collar jangles. Instruments feel malleable on the new album, bending to Apple’s needs as if light through a prism. A carefully attuned sense to beat allows her to effortlessly whiplash between styles on Fetch The Bolt Cutters with convention-rejecting flair it grounds the album in a visceral pulse that guides her new music much as doomy orchestration once did. Apple went on: “Then the rhythms would continue all day.” Apple has also long been a hip-hop fan ]- ]the only new album she bought in her breakout year of 1997 was Wu-Tang Clan’s Forever. “Leaves fall and I tap the rhythms,” Apple said in a recent interview, recalling how the great English author Virginia Woolf would hone her sentences’ rhythms on brisk countryside walks. Apple’s song blazes like a meteor, as if powered by a knowledge that living on your own terms can make a person ignite.Īpple moves to her own beat in her spare time, too: she’s a regular hiker. “Cosmonauts” feels similarly emancipated, a piano-led tribute to polyamorous relationships with airy coos, weird rattles, and snatches of chatter, which could bring to mind Karen O’s The Moon Song, if that song ended in ardent screams. ![]() “I know that time is elastic / And I know when I go / All my particles disband and disperse / And I'll be back in the pulse.” Apple delivers her words with cosmic glee, as if she is already merged to the wind, feeling energy shifts and moving with the sun. “I move with the trees in the breeze,” she sings. The opener, “I Want You To Love Me,” feels like Apple lifting a shroud: a plain-spoken ballad on which her voice pierces through piano which echoes as if played in an old music hall. ![]() That’s no accident: Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the sound of liberation, with some of the auteur’s most majestic and elliptical songwriting, sly hooks, weird sonic experiments, welcome accidents (dogs barking, tactile imperfections), in an album that can feel as bracing as the sea air at Apple’s Venice Beach home. The album title taps into the sense of rebellion that has long been intrinsic to Apple’s survivalist poetry, yet it also evokes a rescue mission and the need to be unshackled. It feels important to gloss some of Apple’s biography here given that her majestic fifth album Fetch the Bolt Cutters frequently glances backward, to the fingerprints she “left upon the track,” as it celebrates the present. This world was bullshit but Fiona Apple kept singing. She grazed capital-F fame and the pressures made her scratch her wrists raw she considered calling her second album Corrupt. ![]() In the ‘90s she weathered abuse and misapprehensions, received prestigious accolades, formed a tabloid-baiting alliance with “Satanist” Marylin Manson for fun. “I would beg to disagree, but begging disagrees with me.” For more than two decades, the creative maverick’s work has been characterized by musical voracity as well as Apple’s refusal to take any shit. ![]() Midway through her new album, Fiona Apple sings a line that sums up much of her career.
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