Waxahatchee - Early Recordings

Pitchfork 72

There’s a box in every family home filled with dusty memories: binders of photos yellowing at the corners, VHS tapes rerecorded over as lives grow larger. Sifting through these ephemera of someone’s life can make you feel like an intruder, a stranger projecting yourself into the frame of a memory that isn't yours.

There's a similar feeling when listening to the reissue of Katie Crutchfield’s first EP as Waxahatchee. Five years ago, she recorded five songs, pressed them onto a limited-run split cassette (the B-side of the original belonged to the musician Chris Clavin), gave them mostly to friends and family, and forgot about them as her touring started to pick up speed. After some hesitation to release these tracks, nostalgia won out for Crutchfield and now she’s opened this archive to the public, retitled as Early Recordings.

Throughout the EP’s very short runtime (less than 15 minutes total), Crutchfield is able to fit microscopic narrative arcs in songs that often span less than 50 words and three minutes. The set opens with an extremely tactile moment: the sound of a body shuffling and a switch turning. Perhaps it’s Crutchfield firing up her recorder. This short pocket is almost like cinéma vérité, as the purposeful editing creates a natural feel; in less than five seconds, you’re transported into the room with her.

On the opener, “Black Candy,” she quickly displays her knack for writing lyrics that are simultaneously dramatic (“Moonlight pours in tonight and you are infinite”), wistful (“Fair weather friends forever and I just wait in line”), and realistically fatalist (“We sit back, watch it atrophy”). In “Home Games,” she paints a scene of youthful love with the pastoral imagery of a Willa Cather story: “Paris in the back of your mom’s Chevrolet/She pretends we're not there, she smells like yesterday/We live like the last two on Earth/And we’ll float on our backs 'til the whole sky goes black.”

Early Recordings’ best song, “Clumsy,” is a meditation on insecurity itself (“Lately I think about insecurity/How I’m not real sure I even know what it means”). It opens in her bedroom as she peers upon a lover’s underwear, realizing how swift this part of her life might be. She begins a series of tough self-criticisms, admits shortcomings, and extends forgiveness. Along the way, Crutchfield is alone with her thoughts in that bed, considering how pain might possibly be a pathway to self-care (“I'm learning about loneliness each night”). Here she combines all the best elements of her songwriting—sharp lyrical detail, conversational phrasing—into one place.

If there is one limitation to the EP, it’s the instrumentation. Crutchfield is only accompanied by a guitar, which can feel more like a metronome than an actual texture. What remains upfront is the twang of her voice and the strength of her writing; if her words were any weaker, her voice any less idiosyncratic, there might be nothing to glom onto and the record would be boring. But the evidence here is raw and puncturing; you hear the whisper of a pleasant secret on the brink of being passed around.