Fiona Apple Fetch The Bolt Cutters 180g 2LP (Vinyl)

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Fiona Apple returns a mere 8 years later for her fifth studio album.

"Up until now, Fiona Apple has dissected the intricacies of pain so well that it seemed silly to ask her for anything else. Her 1996 debut album, Tidal, turned heads for placing a young woman's trauma against a lush piano backdrop, and thereby set in motion the Sad Girl archetype that reverberates through pop to this day. In the midst of praising her art, some critics mistook the 18-year-old's woeful honesty for weakness. Her precocity was turned against her, and everything became a target for scrutiny or ridicule: her weight, her appearance, her album titles, her emotionalism, her ability to sniff out bullshit. In these past two decades, Apple's version of taking charge of this narrative has been to retreat, returning every six, seven, eight years with a new collection of songs, ready for the next wave of devoted acolytes to find solace and catharsis in her work.

"For longtime fans who are expectantly, perhaps giddily, steeling themselves for another brutal LP from Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters will not disappoint. Released with little warning nearly a decade after 2012's The Idler Wheel..., the album sees the now-42-year-old songwriter proving that she's still more than capable of telling off partners, detractors, and others who have done her wrong, all while picking apart the inner workings of her frantic mind. But what sets Bolt Cutters apart from its predecessors is that, for the first time, the scales tip more toward resilience than agony. "I thought that being blacklisted would be grist for the mill, until I realized I'm still here," Apple admits on the title track...

"...On Bolt Cutters, she enlists a small backing band -- guitarist David Garza, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and drummer Amy Aileen Wood -- with much of the album stemming from "jam sessions" in which all four musicians would bang on household objects..." - Claire Shaffer, Rollingstone.com

A perfect album

A bold, cathartic, challenging masterpiece

A monumental album

It's rare, but it happens: A work of art arrives that is so universally acknowledged as a masterpiece that there is barely need for debate, only praise. Last year, it was Parasite; this year it's Fetch the Bolt Cutters. It's raw with snarls, whispers, harmonies, and dog barks; ragged with found percussive instruments and GarageBand recordings; withering with impassioned lyrics about bullies, women, depression, relationships, rape … a list that actually stretches well beyond its 13 tracks. Best of all, Apple no longer sounds consumed by insecurities - she's cut the bolts, you see - which makes her confrontations here acts of amelioration more than agony. In a time where everything is chaos, that's the sort of shoulder-shaking we need. Apple has always created on a different level, so it's not all that surprising she was able to deliver another captivating opus. We're just glad she 'won't shut up.'

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is exactly what so many expected it to be: brilliant. In a surprise to probably no one, Apple is now five for five. Over the last 25 years, she has made five albums that have all - in due time - ascended to holy text status, even if it took some longer than others to come around to her genius. Her most recent, the staggeringly good The Idler Wheel… arrived in 2012. Before that: Extraordinary Machine, in 2005. But Apple isn't just sitting on these songs during the long gaps between albums; she's buffing them to perfection. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is finally here, and it's another miraculous case of bottled lightning. Listening to Fiona Apple is often like bearing witness to a prophet speaking in tongues. It can be difficult, at times, to make out what exactly she's getting at in any given verse, but there's an overwhelming sensation that what she's singing is vastly important. In Fetch the Bolt Cutters' case, these psalms beam clearer than ever before.