Tangles and Binds

It wasn't long after the pandemic began and we went into lockdown that the buzz around Fiona Apple's fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, started. Well, it may be more correct to say that the buzz reached me at that time. The acclaim became ubiquitous in my music news world and I decided to check out the hype and make an attempt to get into Apple's music. The attempt was successful.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters revealed itself to be a fantastic album full of impassioned vocal performances and wonderful piano lines undergirded by catchy rhythms usually banged out by Apple and her musical conspirators using found objects. This build-a-rhythm-with-household-objects ethos coupled with Apple's dogs making the odd appearance in the background gives the album a raw, homespun feel.

When I said buying Fetch the Bolt Cutters was an attempt to get into her music, I didn't mean to imply that I was totally unfamiliar with her previous work. I had, in fact, listened to some of her back catalogue and discovered that she never really clicked with me. Except for one song.

"Hot Knife" appears on her fourth album, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, and is a stone cold classic.

Unlike the more ragged, D.I.Y. ethos that pervades most of the songs on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, "Hot Knife" feels more assembled than simply captured by microphones that happened to be in the room. Musically, it's rather spare with a tympani rhythm punctuated by bursts of piano. Instead it's the singing that stand out here. With some help from her sister Maude Maggart's voice, Apple layers contrasting layers of vocal lines one atop the other until the listener is lost in the knotty tangles of desire.