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The judgment is almost unanimous. Fetch the bolt cutters, the fifth work of Fiona Apple, not only keeps for now the title of the album of the year for the music press, but it qualifies as a masterpiece, the best record of her career and an instant classic in a season of great albums of women thanks to Grimes and Dua Lipa.
“It is not just the wild craftsmanship of each song (…), it is that they are not afraid of what they are doing: with sounds, with structures, with people’s expectations,” explains the review in The New York Times. “It is difficult to make a better album,” proclaims El País de España, while the Los Angeles Times compares her to Nina Simone. On the Metacritic site, it reached a maximum score marking a milestone in the page’s history, surpassing great stars such as Kendrick Lamar or legends like Brian Wilson. User reviews on the same link are less emphatic – 8.8 out of 10 – but still notoriously favorable. According to Spotify data, Fiona Apple’s success is limited to the United States, with its music in great demand in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Seattle.
The records of the 42-year-old New Yorker arouse interest and hubbub since Tidal (1996), who immediately established her as a prodigy of the author’s song on the piano. He earned a Grammy for that album, recording nearly three million copies sold in the U.S.
From the beginning, Fiona was more than awards, success in record stores and comparisons with Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette. It became a kind of proto hipster symbol of high sensitivity and unusual sincerity. She revealed that she was raped at the age of 12 at the door of her Manhattan apartment, exacerbating eating disorders, depression and anxiety, at a time when no musical star revealed such traumas.
At the height of his fame, when he predicted that he would die after a new album, he had media romances first with the magician David Blaine and then with the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who at that time surfed his own wave of recognition and flattery thanks to Boogie nights (1997), giving way to a toxic romance set in hard drugs and the psychological abuse of the director.
Fiona Apple cultivated a love-hate relationship with the captive media of her talent, but also suspicious of certain attitudes – “this world sucks,” he said when receiving the MTV award for best new artist in 1997-, and its melodramatic intensity. exposed in a songbook of confessional and therapeutic contours.
He reached the full card of a brilliant artist by publishing albums of kilometric titles like When the pawn… (1999), the start of a 444-character poem, abort sessions to curl up for days on a sofa watching Columbo on TV as a form of protest against the pressures of his label, and suspend a South American tour in 2012 by the death of her pet Janet, a 14-year-old pit bull dog – “a pacifist” and “best friend”, as she described in a farewell letter – whose bones are part of the percussion included in this latest album.
Fetch the bolt cutters, translated as “bring the bolt cutters”, a line taken from the series The Fall starring Gillian Anderson, has been a long-running work at her home in Venice, the famous beach town of Los Angeles, where the album began to take shape eight years ago. The premise of work was experimental from the beginning, with the artist and her musicians -Sebastian Steinberg on bass, multi-instrumentalist David Garza and Amy Aileen Wood on drums- determined to get sounds out of the house, turning all kinds of elements into percussion, including oil cans filled with dirt and containers covered with elastics.
The gang spun around the property hitting and singing “like an organism rather than an assembly, something natural,” Steinberg synthesized to The New Yorker. They also went to Sonic Ranch in Texas, where distortion and experimentation were the norm. Under the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms, Fiona saw Whiplash (2014) – the drum movie that drummers hate – Amy accidentally ingested snake venom, and filmed inside an abandoned water tower.
In an age where pop is composed around tribal-inspired electronic percussions, Fiona Apple uses the same language from an organic perspective with phenomenal eloquence. The piano continues to be one of the pivots from the first song, “I want you to love me”, and its cascade of notes that recall the freshness and grace of Claudio Parra. The more mature voice expands into new tones as the rhythms and beats produced with unorthodox methods finish putting together a collage of raw sound, exposed as a tape in real time.
The album indeed deserves the vast majority of praise, but its voluptuousness also circles in spite of ingenuity. It can be classified as brilliant and accused of self-indulgence. Get to the end of Fetch the bolt cutters it enchants and at the same time exhausts.
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