“American Weekend,” the bracing first album the songwriter Katie Crutchfield released as Waxahatchee, was “a result of a snowstorm, a visceral stupor, and a personal breakthrough,” she wrote in the liner notes. Stranded for a week in her parents’ home near Alabama’s Waxahatchee Creek, she found out in winter 2011 what so many of us are learning right now: that self-isolation can lead to heightened emotions, antic spurts of creativity and relentless self-scrutiny.
“I don’t care, I’ll embrace all of my vices,” Crutchfield wailed on “Grass Stain,” a muddy and urgent late-night confession. Seven years and three increasingly polished Waxahatchee records later, Crutchfield realized in summer 2018 that she was never going to drink herself happy. “It’s not a very dramatic story,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview. “I had gone back and forth a lot about my substance issues, and I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done with this forever.’” And so on her confident and accomplished fifth album, “Saint Cloud,” Crutchfield takes the same hard look in the mirror that she did nearly a decade ago, only this time without the murky filter of those vices.
Though Crutchfield was raised on a steady diet of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, discovering punk’s sound and ethos cemented her as a musician. She and her twin sister, Allison, formed the pop-punk band the Ackleys while still in high school, and they later found a cult audience with their scrappy, lyrical D.I.Y. trio P.S. Eliot. Back then, the twins found plenty to bemoan about their hometown: Birmingham, Ala., was politically conservative and even its seemingly utopian underground music scene was woefully sexist, leading her to reject her Southern identity.
On “Saint Cloud,” Crutchfield, now 31, embraces the homegrown twang she once rebelled against. (The album’s title, like the moody closing number, is a nod to her father’s Florida hometown.) “Saint Cloud” is a departure from the hoarse holler and blustery distortion of Waxahatchee’s previous record, “Out in the Storm” from 2017; instead it finds her adopting a cleaner sound. She sounds at ease with herself: The lead single “Can’t Do Much” has a gentle, breezy energy and guitar licks as delicately intricate as handkerchief embroidery. “I love you ’til the day I die,” she sings. “I guess it don’t matter why.”
Many of Waxahatchee’s best-loved songs are odes to bruising breakups, bleary nights and the kind of wisdom that comes with the asking price of a “sharp hangover.” Now that she is sober and in a long-term relationship with the indie musician Kevin Morby, “Saint Cloud” plumbs different sources of tension and conflict, mostly within Crutchfield’s own mind. “I’m in a war with myself,” she sings on the stomping, stirring “War,” a song that deftly maps out the common ground shared by Lucinda Williams and Lana Del Rey.
In her earlier songs, Crutchfield’s lyrics could sometimes come off as opaque (from “Brother Bryan” in 2013: “Our habits secrete to the sidewalk and street, our civic hell”). As she’s matured, though, she’s found a knack for simple, evocative lyrics and memorable imagery: eyes “roll around like dice on the felt,” someone’s “selling tomatoes at five bucks a bag.”
The album’s final three songs make up its strongest stretch, beginning with the vivid Springsteenian storytelling of “Arkadelphia,” which finds Crutchfield pondering her possible fate had she not cleaned up her lifestyle: “If I burn like a light bulb, they’ll say, she wasn’t meant for that life.” Even more poignant is “Ruby Falls,” an empathic ballad about an old friend who did not survive his addiction. Crutchfield, the one who lived to tell his story, named the song after a passage in Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids.”
Though she and her sister came up in a male-dominated scene that saw them as anomalies, Crutchfield has become something of a pioneer to a new generation of young women who make rock music and sing unapologetically about the imperfections of their lives. In a 2017 interview, Crutchfield said that younger bands’ frontwomen sometimes called her for advice. (“Fairy godmother,” Allison playfully teased.)
With “Saint Cloud,” though, Crutchfield seems to be reporting back to them from yet another frontier. She’s come to realize that one can still write adventurously about a more balanced way of life. As she articulates on “Saint Cloud,” too, self-reflection is not a one-and-done activity to be checked off a to-do list. Like recovery, love and artistic growth, it’s a life’s work best doled out over the long haul.
Waxahatchee
“Saint Cloud”
(Merge)
Source: Music - nytimes.com
