Image by: Fiona Apple 

Welcome to the new music review where we connect you with some of the best new music spinning on Breakfast, The Daily and Drive programs.

ALBUMS:

Fiona Apple – Fetch The Bolt Cutters (FEATURE ALBUM)
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Hazel English – Wake Up!
Lucinda Williams – Good Souls Better Angels
Quelle Chris & Chris Keys – Innocent Country 2
Tom Misch & Youssef Dayes – What Kinda Music
X – Alphabetland

SINGLES:

Ela Minus – They Told Us It Was Hard, But They Were Wrong
Emma Shields – Lucy
Even As We Speak – Someone
Jehnny Beth – Flowers
Kelly Lee Owens – Night

After an eight year break, the New York singer-writer Fiona Apple has finally returned with her follow-up to 2012’s The Idler Wheel. Building upon the more experimental side to that earlier record, Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a visceral, percussive, and percussion-heavy record that sees Apple crooning and howling over improvised drums and staccato piano lines. Apple’s lyrics are as potent as ever as she indicts the men who have stuffed her over and opens up about her uncomfortable relationship with fame: “I thought being blacklisted would be grist for the mill / Until I realised I’m still here”. The result is a raw, powerful, and uninhibited performance where the physicality of Apple’s singing hits us as hard as her melodies and message. Like Kate Bush running up that hill, Apple is left breathless at the end of some of these songs as if she’s given us everything she has to offer.

The country legend Lucinda Williams is back with her first album of original material since 2016’s The Ghosts of Highway 20. In those years, Williams hasn’t lost step as her songwriting has gotten sharper than ever: the Flannery O’Connor acolyte’s lyrics are potent and sparse, not daring to waste a word, and her songs keep to a simple verse-chorus form with a dedication similar to that of the late John Prine. Her main target on this album is Trump who, like a bad ghost, haunts the album as Williams tries to shoo him out on songs like “Man Without A Soul” and “You Can’t Rule Me”. Both Williams and her backing band sound heavier than ever: the former commanding a deep voice bearing the gravity of her words, and the latter with a sludgy, bluesy sound that sounds drenched in a Louisiana swamp. What we’re left with is an album from a crucial American songwriter who still commands control over the form like no other.