Allison Crutchfield - Tourist in This Town

The Guardian 80

(Merge)

The first minute of Alabama singer-songwriter Allison Crutchfield’s debut album is sung a cappella. It’s an intimate experience, hearing her multitracked voice without accompaniment, and when the band kicks in it’s quite a surprise – not least because the dominant sound is 80s analogue synthesisers, a specialty of producer Jeff Zeigler. There are cooing backing vocals, buzzsaw new-wave guitars and one-finger synth patterns. Crutchfield’s lyrics are conversational and literate, like those of Eleanor Friedberger or Courtney Barnett. But in contrast to the comfortable retrofitted backdrop and her voice, prettified by Bangles-style harmonies, Crutchfield’s lyrics are not all sweetness and light. Tourist in This Town is a break-up album: there’s a lot of getting upset in hotel rooms (Mile Away) and not being able to enjoy being in a nice place because of relationship upsets and “bodies in the basement” (Sightseeing). Still, it’s not a hard listen: songs such as Secret Lives and Deaths and I Don’t Ever Wanna Leave California are uplifting pop confections.

The Guardian 80

(Merge)

Here’s a welcome addition to the crowded canon of breakup albums. Allison Crutchfield, luminary of the Philadelphia DIY music scene, has described her debut as a “feminist” kiss off. That’s not feminist as in “angry” or “self-pitying”, the response of the Hornby-esque subject of Mile Away, who locks himself away to wallow in Springsteen’s Nebraska. Crutchfield’s heartache emerges in bittersweet postcards from life on tour with her twin sister’s band Waxahatchee. The emotional rollercoaster of losing her bearings is delivered with finger-snapping pop melodies, twanging guitars and widescreen analogue synths, letting plenty of sunshine into the sadness. The results fizz and bob like a Berocca for the ears.

Pitchfork 78

In 2014, between projects, Allison Crutchfield released Lean in to It, a synth-led EP of private epiphanies on love and heartbreak. From an artist given to collaboration—not least with her sister, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield—its starkness was intriguing. Allison and Katie’s first major outfit was Birmingham, Alabama’s P.S. Eliot, a raucous pop-punk band whose busy lyrics and zipwire melodies seemed, in brief moments, to make the planet spin twice as fast. In 2012, a year after they split, Allison moved from drums to the mic with Swearin’, still reveling in the racket of ferocious guitars. She began work on Tourist in This Town after Swearin’ played their last show, in 2015, due to her split with co-songwriter Kyle Gilbride. After years touring with her sister and boyfriend, the 28-year-old’s Lean in to It follow-up—and debut solo LP—might have occasioned a reckoning with independence and her unmapped future. Instead, she finds her compasses jammed by existential drift and haunting memories.

As on Lean in to It, which corralled tales of youth romance gone awry, Tourist in This Town is a breakup record whose ennui goes beyond romance. Couched in her stories are trials of self-acceptance, psychic grappling, physical dislocation. Cleanly produced by Philly synth-whisperer Jeff Zeigler, the LP channels the kind of late-80s synth pop that jettisoned style in favor of vastness and grace—skyline synths pirouette, vocals implore, pensive guitars sporadically erupt. The effect is to coalesce Crutchfield’s anecdotes and soliloquies into a blur of fury and melancholy.

Like her sister, Crutchfield has a knack for sardonic observations designed to bore through the bullshit of young adulthood (mostly emanating from other young adults). With less room for stormy punk guitars, Tourist proceeds with a new lightness of touch. Instead of steel-plating her tongue, the music consoles and reveres the heart-on-sleeve lyrics. On “Sightseeing,” as piano chords sprout reverb, Crutchfield recounts an awkward face-to-face encounter (“You say nothing/You just come sit next to me”) in an anguished tone that suggests a divine experience. It’s oddly dramatic, and a little jarring, but the lyrics’ psychological layers—“Baby, you are not as sad as you want me to think”—somehow bring you to her level.

Rather than submit to the inevitability of breakups, Crutchfield obsessively autopsies what went wrong: she purports to be “selfish” “shallow,” and “unstable” on “Broad Daylight”; on “Mile Away,” she seethes to her partner, “You assume you understand because your voice is the loudest.” These scenes often occur in public—waiters refill glasses, onlookers mock her tears. More than heated blow-outs, they sound like scrappy internal monologues, filling silences made unbearable by the weight and breadth of what’s unsaid. On “Charlie,” Crutchfield and her partner inhabit a domestic space flooded with conflicting memories—their touching pillow-talk, his yelling in her face. When she concludes, “You bite me on my neck like I was something you could eat/You bite me ’cos you like the way I feel in your teeth,” her tone taints the cuteness with a dash of something sinister.

If there’s a drawback to this psychic dredging, it’s a slightly limited emotional range. Crutchfield frames scenes vividly, yet we rarely feel the weight of the mutual devastation, the perverse thrill of love discarded. When her post-romantic tumult subsides, on “Expatriate,” a moment of introspective honesty is warranted—one that might carry more weight had the tone ventured further afield elsewhere. “The things you used to hate about me are all heightened now,” she sings, with a measure of contentment. “But I love myself, or I’m figuring out how.” The line still resonates, but it’s more satisfying, in this case, to see her meticulous, anxiety-parsing work as its own redemption—entombing the past in a reliquary of sad matters settled.