“Drank another person’s juice and left solely the rind,” Katie Crutchfield boasts on her wonderful new Waxahatchee album, Tigers Blood. She’s received a proper to sound cocky. The long-time indie-rock underdog hero gained herself plenty of new followers with Saint Cloud, her 2020 breakthrough hit, going for a laid-back type of heartland rock & roll twang. However Tigers Blood is much more rugged and assured, a grasp storyteller absolutely conscious she’s on a scorching streak. She sings about grownup romance, struggling for sobriety, the day-to-day work of holding it collectively—within the poetic voice of a Lucinda Williams who got here of age taking part in DIY punk-house basement reveals.
To many followers, Crutchfield is a recent new voice, but she’s already lived out so many wonderful tales. She grew up a teenage emo prodigy in Alabama, becoming a member of together with her twin sister Allison to type cult bands like P.S. Eliot and Dangerous Banana. She discovered her voice with Waxahatchee, within the brooding guitar poetry of her 2013 gem Cerulean Salt. So far as most devotees had been involved, Out within the Storm appeared like her career-capper, an indie reply to Tapestry, one of many decade’s most sensible rock singer-songwriter statements. But she was simply on the point of intention greater.
Saint Cloud was an enormous departure musically, with country-flavored Americana within the mode of Tom Petty, Wilco, or late R.E.M., with the spooked balladry of Emmylou Harris or Townes Van Zandt. However the album made her infinitely extra well-known and common, with out shedding any of her outdated followers. She’s been on a roll since then, teaming up with Jess Williamson for the one-off duo Plains, with their 2022 sleeper I Walked With You a Methods. Tigers Blood goes even additional into her nation roots. (“I grew up on nation,” she informed Rolling Stone in 2018. “That’s my dad and mom’ music—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones.”)
Crutchfield rejoins producer Brad Cook dinner, slicing these songs with a tight-knit band of collaborators like Phil Cook dinner on keyboards and Spencer Tweedy on drums. (Sure relation, Sherlock.) However she finds an ideal guitar foil in MJ Lenderman, the North Carolina axeman finest identified for taking part in in Wednesday, in addition to his personal as barn-shaking gems like Boat Songs. (“You Are Each Lady To Me” is a contemporary customary.) His wild guitar and back-up vocals add the fitting contact of electrical mayhem, whereas the band provides prospers of banjo and pedal metal.
“Proper Again To It” is her knockout rocker right here, as she and Lenderman harmonize like a ragged-ass Gram and Emmylou. It’s a fractured love story about pondering your self into corners, then having to assume your self out of them. “I get forward of myself/Refusing anybody’s assist,” she admits, letting her thoughts run wild worrying over outdated flames or jealous flashes or non-existent issues. However the couple’s salvation is in remembering to take heed to the rhythm of every others’ hearts. “You simply settle in like a love music,” she sings. “If I can sustain/We’ll get proper again to it.”
Probably the most haunting second is “365,” a stark acoustic ballad of a codependent confronting the addict she carries on her shoulders. The narrator wonders if she’s trapped, confessing, “While you fail, I fail/While you fly, I fly/And it’s a protracted approach to come again down.” (She initially thought of handing this tune to the nation legend Wynonna Judd, who grew to become a pal after Saint Cloud—the 2 dropped a duet in 2022, “Different Aspect.”) “365” is the quietest music right here—however probably the most horrifying.
“Bored” has an easygoing bar-band jangle, like .38 Particular taking a move at Springsteen’s “Streets of Fireplace.” She sings about feelings on the snapping point: “My backbone’s a rotted two-by-four/Barely hanging on/My benevolence hits the ground.” Tigers Blood is an album that makes you marvel at how a lot Katie Crutchfield has achieved, over all of the miles she’s traveled thus far. However it’s additionally an album that makes you excited for wherever she goes from right here.
