Fiona Apple, Fetch The Bolt Cutters

I've listened to Fiona Apple's fifth album, Fetch The Bold Cutters, multiple times over the past three days since it was first released. I cannot get it out of my head, needing to hear it again and again. As Contributing Editor Jenn Pelly wrote, this album is 'unbound'. Pelly writes,"No music has ever sounded quite like it. 

Apple recorded Fetch the Bolt Cutters both in and with her Venice Beach home, banging on its walls, stomping on its ground. Self-reliance is its rule, curiosity is its key. Fetch the Bolt Cutters seems to almost completely turn the volume down on music history, while it cranks up raw, real life—handclaps, chants, and other makeshift percussion, in harmony with space, echoes, whispers, screams, breathing, jokes, so-called mistakes, and dog barks. (At least five dogs are credited: Mercy, Maddie, Leo, Little, and Alfie.) All of this debris orbits around the core of Apple’s music: her voice, her piano, and most of all her words, which have always been her primary instrument. It creates a wild symphony of the everyday." 

So what's it all about? Again Pelly, "It happens to most of us at an early age: the realization that life will not follow a straight line on the path towards fulfillment. Instead, life spirals. The game is rigged, power corrupts, and society is, in a word, bullshit. Art can expose the lies.....On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she unapologetically indicts the world around her. And she rejects its oppressive logic in every note. The very sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters dismantles patriarchal ideas: professionalism, smoothness, competition, perfection — aesthetic standards that are tools of capitalism, used to warp our senses of self.”