Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm
Pitchfork 82
Katie Crutchfield’s fourth album features sharp, gorgeous songwriting. The polished production and urgent performances ensure her fiery exorcisms about the end of a relationship are deeply felt.
Thu Jul 13 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Waxahatchee
Out in the Storm
[Merge; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
I was in the bar reading periodicals while waiting for a slow friend, suspecting that The New Yorker might just be a rag in which rich people sublimate each other’s money on the astral plane. But it’s how I found out about her. All the news was routine, tales of the big men and the little guys, but one right turn led me to something else entirely, a feature about a siren-saint named Katie Crutchfield. From that magazine page, pancake flat, her words emerged like a body from an alpine lake: crisp, revitalized, treacherously truthful.
I sussed out and turned up her then-current Cerulean Salt, its title announcing all the good in it: those soft starting letters sounding alike but looking so not, each vowel taking turns with all the others like a backbeat. “Lively,” her best song, not only describes veracity (“You lie/ When the truth is as vast as the dark, gray sky”), but also enacts it (“You’d die/ Before you’d look me in the eye,” she sings, peering at us). I made my way to her earlier American Weekend, lo-fi in the classic sense: sturdy, bare, fraught. Nothing but spine-strong words, elegantly idiomatic verse made by curved knuckles and painted nails, language I could hear myself with.
Out in the Storm hones that truth; it wonders about it. “You ring me up/ I tell the truth,” goes “Fade,” and “You’ll have your truth/ I’ll have mine,” goes “Hear You.” Ten songs divulge it, which don’t have sections so much as well-portioned energies: a steady wash on “Silver,” a momentous stretching out in the joints of “Never Been Wrong,” a thrilling slowing down at the long end of “No Question,” where a series of harmonic modulations spins out a repetition: “It sets you free.” And “8 Ball,” an utterly summer song, is Crutchfield’s best one yet, lovelier even than “Lively,” with her recitations skipping across the surface of a pleasant surf sound: “I’ll dream, embarrassing reverie/ I’m all detached, feeling like myself.”
The record’s adversarial feeling imprints — a wall punched out, a face yelled in — are cancelled by their wry sincerity, shy of sarcastic. Addressees receive loving second-person accusations, angled toward some you, this spiteful you who will “name my weakness” and “brand my losing streak,” this stubborn you who will “politely point out all the goodness this world lacks,” this radiant you who wants to be the rain. Against it, her I observes mingled self-knowledge and -pity in others via its own “death grip on some faint humility,” seen clearly through her sister’s eyes: “Everyone will hear me complain/ Everyone will pity my pain.”
Truth requires no triangulation; it doesn’t even need one witness. And yet, the “jagged truth left unheard,” when revealed, makes you feel, as Caroline Rayner wrote of Ivy Tripp, less washed up. “I hoped telling all this truth would be liberating,” sings Crutchfield on “No Question,” and I hope it was. While everybody is telling everyone else how to spell our fake names, she’s up at 9 AM, hands full of pencils and guitars. She claims she diligently keeps “business hours” to make her music, that she tosses away even the catchiest song if one syllable is mistaken. Reading that vast fact, the songs its settled proof, made me feel less strange, spaciously unseen, just broken open enough. If lies, they might as well be true.
The Guardian 80
(Merge)
Katie Crutchfield, the Alabama-born singer-songwriter behind Waxahatchee, has always tended towards introspection. Over the course of three well received albums, she has traded in the sort of laceratingly honest indie that to the listener feels horribly, yet compellingly intimate. So, the news that album number four is a breakup album, recorded, per the press release, “amidst the dissolution of a noxious relationship”, could cause some concern. Just what self-flagellatory depths are likely to be plumbed here?
We needn’t have worried. Out in the Storm, while as frank as Crutchfield’s earlier albums, also sees her kicking back against the person who wronged her. Musically it offers some of her most robust work to date, her chiming alt-rock melodies ballasted by a full band that includes her sister Allison. There’s also a confrontational quality to Crutchfield’s lyrics, a sense that she’s willing to scrutinise the failings of others as readily as she would her own.
Continue reading... Thu Jul 13 17:00:00 GMT 2017The Guardian 80
(Merge)
A messy postmortem of a bad relationship, Katie Crutchfield’s fourth album as Waxahatchee is thrillingly alive with recrimination, regret and release. Opening with a storm of bright, serrated guitars, it’s also her best, most arresting collection yet. Recorded with Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth collaborator John Agnello, there’s no filler among these 10 songs, from the summer-breezily defiant Silver, via the grungy swing and swagger of Brass Beam, to the rueful Belly-ish balladry of A Little More. Among the best is Sparks Fly, a soft awakening in which Crutchfield sheds guilt and thrills in her single self: “I see myself through my sister’s eyes/ I’m a live wire, electrified.”
Continue reading... Sun Jul 16 07:00:15 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 80
The slow rise of Katie Crutchfield – better known as Waxahatchee – has been a fascinating one. Crutchfield has something in her voice that many of her contemporaries simply do not possess. Perhaps it's the southern twang as a result of her being a native Alabaman, perhaps it's the force at which she delivers her devastating lines, but one thing is certain, that she just keeps getting better and better with every album. Her third full-length, and first on Merge Records, 2015's Ivy Tipp saw her breakthrough into the more mainstream conscious and feature heavily on many writers' end of year lists, however, it was an album that in places promised rather than delivered.
Now, two years on, Crutchfield returns with the John Agnello-produced (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile) Out in the Storm, candidly detailing the demise of her relationship with ex-bandmate and producer Keith Spencer. While 'the breakup album' is a trope that has been done to death, it is also one that never stops being relevant, to artist or audience, because we all go through it at one point or another. What's important, is how the artist approaches this very common subject matter. As tough as breakups can be, they are also often incredibly inspiring times (once you've begun to get over feeling sorry for yourself, that is). Therefore, not to wish personal upset on anyone, but Crutchfield has tapped into something with her songwriting based on both her personal and professional experiences as a musician, to create something magic.
After enlisting her twin sister Alison, Sky Larkin and Sleater-Kinney touring guitarist Katie Harkin along with Katherine Simonetti on bass and Ashley Arnwine on drums, she has as a band who perfectly backs up this tough song material. Agnello reportedly encouraged the band to record together live, and you can tell on the perfect pop-rock songs 'Silver' and opener 'Never Been Wrong'. There is an energy between these musicians that push these songs musically beyond a backing band to Crutchfield's heartbreak and into something transcendent. Of course, Crutchfield is still centre-stage, this is her story, her songs after all, but there's a dynamism that Waxahatchee previously lacked from the freedom that's been entrusted on these musicians.
In many ways, Out in the Storm is a tough listen, especially for anyone currently going through the same situation. However, it is also a brutally honest, refreshing, empowering, cathartic listen, as Crutchfield addresses everything that happened between her and her former partner, admitting her own mistakes just as much as his. The stunning 'Recite Remorse', which opens on an organ-line akin to Frightened Rabbit's 'Keep Yourself Warm' from The Midnight Organ Fight, essentially sums up the making-up, breaking-up and aftermath of her entire relationship, adding bass and then drums in each section of the song's narrative. Lines such as "I saw you as a big fish/I saw you as a conquest/I know for you/it's easier to walk away" are the gut-punching honesty that is part of the course here.
However, Out in the Storm isn't a linear re-telling of her relationship. 'Sparks Fly' for instance, which comes next, tells a happier, if still bittersweet, memory of times which once seemed better. 'Brass Beam' perhaps the angriest song of the bunch, as well as being the most "southern" of anything here, lamenting "when I think about it/I want to punch a wall" at past mistakes and beliefs. Crutchfield's fourth album works because it's varied but never outstays its welcome or veers into self-indulgence. '8 Ball' is an excellent chamber-pop song, 'Hear You' experiments with a more electronic sound through a fuzzed-out bass, 'No Question' is a straight-up rocker.
The album is at its most devastating towards its quieter climax. 'A Little More' is a warning sign, breaking things down to Crutchfield's more natural acoustic-guitar ballad habitations. Closer 'Fade' however, is a real sucker-punch. It is Crutchfield's defining statement that she is finally getting through this tough period in her personal life, reminiscing everything she gained and lost over "three years shedding my skin/dreaming about the potential/the person I could have been.. Painful as they may be, Crutchfield's lyrics are perfect all over her fourth album. Instantaneously direct, but not without using imagery that is both recognisable and relatable. It's difficult not to shed a tear at the final coda:
"I kissed you goodbye/and hid for the rest of your life/I stayed out of your way/I'm fading, fading away."
Wed Jul 19 13:16:17 GMT 2017