The Daily Spin, October 15
Fiona Apple | Fetch The Bolt Cutters
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Fetch The Bolt Cutters (2020)
Artist: Fiona Apple
Link:
When it’s good, Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a truly enjoyable sort of alternative record, but the base problem of the album is that it rarely knows what it wants to be, and as such, rarely ever takes the time to land on a single identity that works for it.
Pitchfork landed on this at a 10, and rarely have I disagreed with the review aggregator site more - which is to be expected, as music is so deeply subjective at its base and there’s no real way to project uniformity across an entire world of opinions - but man, I really think they got this one wrong.
The first approximation that is coming to mind is Jacob Collier, which on its surface is complimentary, but the further I look at it, I think the reason that comes to mind so easily is a shared propensity to overuse sound. Where Collier does this by stacking ten thousand vocal lines of himself over and over again, a gargantuan megalith of Jacobs that will then wail over tunes so obscenely complicated that supercomputers would struggle to run through them, Apple instead does this by… making noise. Titular track ‘Fetch The Bolt Cutters’ is great for about four minutes and then descends into a cavalcade of barking dogs and slamming doors.
That is, of course, the album at its best.
It’s an album that feels like it may have been perfect for a very specific brand of lockdown insanity - I guess, if you didn’t fall into baking bread or Animal Crossing like most of us, your other option was to turn to your instruments. Bo Burnham brought us the beautifully comedic and oddly touching INSIDE, and Fiona Apple brought us… this.
Three years on, I’m left feeling as though, while this may have established the correct level of insanity that many of us went through in the spring of 2020, nowadays we’re left with no other option but to look back and ask ourselves “what the fuck”.
Rating: 3.3/10
Best Tracks: Fetch The Bolt Cutters
Worst Tracks: Under The Table; For Her