Katie Crutchfield has a habit of touching parts of your heart other songwriters can’t quite reach. Waxahatchee’s 2020 breakout ‘Saint Cloud’ was outstanding, a bold song cycle about escaping trauma and embracing sobriety etched in spartan Americana. Since then, she’s released an album with Plains – a joint project she shares with Jess Williamson – while carefully working on her next step with Waxahatchee. Previewing fresh material during two nights at London’s EartH venue last year, the stripped back performance – just voice, and one acoustic – belied the emotional heft of the material, and the subtle transformations occurring within.
A step beyond ‘Saint Cloud’, new album ‘Tigers Blood’ perhaps lacks the searing emotion of its forebear, but it makes up for this in aesthetic confidence. A record that feels truly lived in, producer Brad Cook captures a real intimacy in these 12 performances, arrangements that full utterly unforced and true.
Opener ‘3 Sisters’ is wonderful, Katie Crutchfield’s voice pleading a “hopeless prayer” while time passes endlessly by. The choppy ‘Evil Spawn’ feels a tad more direct, before ‘Ice Cold’ seems to fully embrace her Southern roots – a subversive yet joyous roadhouse hymn, her profoundly visual lyrical flair (“A rusted out sign / Jesus loves you”) has rarely been bettered.
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Indeed, if there’s one shift between 2020 opus ‘Saint Cloud’ and this record, it’s an expanded musical palette. MJ Lenderman graces ‘Right Back To It’, their voices pirouetting, completely intertwined. Country rocker ‘Bored’ is a highway hymnal, while the warming, pedal steel drenched ‘Crimes Of The Heart’ is a Southern soul ballad for the ages.
An album where virtually every single note is worth cherishing, ‘Tigers Blood’ feels carefully hewn, and exceptionally curated. ‘Crowbar’ – “I left your heart of glass in an unmade bed” – is like honey on the ear, but there’s savagery in the lyric, as she broaches a “paradox poetic”.
The slumped strut of ‘The Wolves’ carries a quiet but enduring confidence, while closer – and title track – ‘Tigers Blood’ learns to broaden its spell, additional voices helping to expand and intensify Waxahatchee’s vision. It’s a potent closer, with each part allowed its own identity, unified by Katie Crutchfield’s brilliant lyric, and her palpable sense of purpose. A warming end, to an endlessly engrossing record.
8/10
Words: Robin Murray
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