fiona apple - fetch the bolt cutters (2020)

holy fuck @ her vocal in "Holy Balloon."

oh my god "newspaper"

Wow this is fantastic. On first listen I reckon this could end up my favourite Fiona alongside When The Pawn.

The sound/approach reminds me a lot of early Veda Hille.

It's my favorite Apple already

finally, Fiona Apple songs I can put on a workout playlist

this album is fucking great and i got to review it

and it's a damn fine review

damn this is good. thanks y'all for putting me on to this.

thanks alfred :)

Feels like 2011 wasn't that long ago! So she has a rate of a new album every 6/8 years.

holy shit this record

10.

The overall sound is interesting, sounds like the 21st century version of the lo-fi, diy album that doesn’t suck.

As usual the best part is how percussive Fiona Apple loves her arrangements.

haven't heard it but Pitchfork giving a Fiona Apple album a 10 in 2020 is something I can get behind

This also has her most manic sounding moments of all time, this is a good sign btw.

10 on p4k

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters/

Maura read your review earlier, great stuff

it's very good but i wouldn't give it a perfect score yet. p4k has given far worse albums a 10 in the past though so if something's going to get put on a weird pedestal i'd much rather have it be this

thank you ums <3

I like both maura’s and p4k reviews, they pick on different aspects on why this album has the potential of being an early contender for AOTY, great release date too imho. Right place, right moment sort of album.

in one of the videos where she answer fans questions, one of them asks her who some of her favorite musicians are, and the 3 she names are Miriam Makeba, Kate Bush, and Joan Armatrading. I feel like this provides all the context you'd need for the world this music exists in.

anyway, Fiona is my actual hero and she has never sounded more like herself. so grateful for her.

Great review Maura!

And yes I agree that both reviews (i.e. Maura's and Pitchfork's) are good. This is one of those rich, dense but inviting albums that I expect will inspire a lot of good writing.

The Pitchfork review references the Slits which makes sense to me but the other act I hear a simpatico with (perhaps because I have been listening to them a lot recently) is The Raincoats (as well as early Veda Hille as mentioned upthread).

Makes sense -- Pelly wrote a 33 1/3 book on The Raincoats.

I'm adoring this already. So glad it has taken the drums-and-piano-in-conversation style of Idler Wheel and used Hot Knife as the jumping off point.

i don't know if i'm comin across but i'm really trying

The Slits reference would work if they had made more songs like "Newtown" (their most Raincoats-y, so Tim otm). Is late Tom Waits too obvious to mention? I found Pelly's "no music has ever sounded like this" line a little silly (Is This Desire? and Medulla also come to mind; I listened to Horse Rotorvator for the first time the other day, etc.).

Anyway, "Criminal" is the only Apple song I've previously consciously heard, so this is pretty wild! I'm not sure it will quite turn out to be My Thing, but I can see why everyone is flipping over it. Even not paying full attention to the lyrics, some knife-like lines pop out.

Presumably it was the editor's call but referring to it as "Fetch" I found very jarring. Couldn't get Mean Girls out of my head, so in essence, your editor should stop trying to make "Fetch" happen.

"No music has ever sounded like this" is not a good line to write in a review of anything I'll be honest.

Vinyl is available for preorder from her website. Includes immediate download. Looking forward to this.

Presumably it was the editor's call but referring to it as "Fetch" I found very jarring. Couldn't get Mean Girls out of my head, so in essence, your editor should stop trying to make "Fetch" happen.

― in twelve parts (lamonti), Friday, April 17, 2020 6:25 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

Maybe my googling skills are rusty, but I'm having a hard time finding her website...

just on shameika and feeling likewise

― devvvine, Thursday, April 16, 2020 10:18 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm

Ha, I don't know why I had a problem with it, but I had to google "fetch the bolt cutters vinyl" to get to a reddit forum which then had a link to her store.

ok now here we are at relay, holy jeez

my display name is more relevant than i would've thought lol

sadly I will never buy the LP thanks to my weird aversion to 2xLP albums that run a hair over 50 minutes

Simon it's sonically irresponsible to press over 45 mins on a single record!! head to the audiophile thread for reeducation

audiophiles can suck it imho

that hurts

two songs on a side I'd rather die

I feel like my only slight criticism after a few listens is I could have gone for a little less repetition on "Cosmonauts". but that's very nitpicky.

First song is good, but kind of a conventional piano song for the most part? I guess I expected it to be weirder on first blush....ok now doing some dolphin noises

That's a false signal.

was skeptical during the first track, and then every single song after that bowled me over, fiona cannot be dethroned

I feel like my only slight criticism after a few listens is I could have gone for a little less repetition on "Cosmonauts". but that's very nitpicky.

― k*r*n koltrane (Simon H.), Friday, April 17, 2020 7:39 AM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i could listen to that chorus foreverrr

This is cool.... One thing that comes to mind is The Jungle Line off Hissing of Summer Lawns

I love the super dense piano sound, the booming upright bass, and it's got some of the best clattering percussion since Tom Waits's Bone Machine. The drums sound like a full kit set up in a cramped bedroom. Plus barking dogs. I'm very into this on first listen, and there's a lot to come back to.

This is cool.... One thing that comes to mind is The Jungle Line off Hissing of Summer Lawns

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, April 17, 2020 10:02 AM (fifty seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

agreed, but that song has never connected with me like every song here did almost immediately

Thanks. She’s an incredible live performer.

An amazing interview/story with the real Shameika and her reunion with Fiona: https://pitchfork.com/features/article/fiona-apple-shameika-fetch-the-bolt-cutters-interview/

She turned out to be a rapper so of course they collab'd: https://open.spotify.com/track/5IelFDwkj5eJEnTSfwroxa?si=mlk-AyQHQuKY3R14anvdCg

And there's also a video now for "Shameika":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM63Tzv-uZg

Love that they were reunited by their New Yorker-reading 3rd-grade teacher.

really glad this worked out in the best way possible

(although a bit surprising that she was a public figure but nobody put the pieces together before now?)

beautiful story, glad they were able to reconnect.

This fixes all the issues I had with "Shameika"

ayo real talk: if you don't like this album, how does it feel to be objectively wrong?

this album is metal as fuck, in that it sounds like it was screwed together at a workbench

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson)

There’s also a seething rage through the whole thing - even in the “sweet” ballads such as cosmonauts - that makes it sound heavier than most metal albums I’ve heard. I haven’t heard this album a lot because it feels like a bad influence to me. Whenever I truly connect with it, it makes me want to burn the world to the ground.

It reminds me of Rain Dogs in that sense but this one feels more wore down and old and angrier.

Such a landmark album. I can’t listen very often because it’s too real and can’t be backgrounded.
I don’t even know how to say this and I feel sure it will sound weird or patronising or just off somehow, but - I gave this album to my ex wife as a gift, because I knew she had a lot of unexpressed anger about me leaving, and I wanted her to know that I understood that and respected it. She loves the record fwiw.

Did she not do any live performances at all? This album sounds like it could be pretty good live but I don’t see evidence of her doing any live performance after 2017.

All I could find is her performing three songs for the New Yorker festival.

it released during covid and she hasn't toured since, though she said in an interview at the time that she wanted to tour once things opened up again. last year she said she still really wants to tour again but her mental health really isn't up to it right now.

she played "ladies" and "i want you to love me" on her 2013 tour with blake mills though