Katie Crutchfield delivers the first words of “3 Sisters,” the first song from Waxahatchee’s sixth album, in a tentative silence, the kind that might precede the easiest or worst volume at your local experience show. “I keep crying / It’s not true and I never move,” she sings, and a little later: “All my life I’ve been working on what you need.” She is unfailingly serious, but her words carry a piercing wit and directness. Her offering sounds idiosyncratic and simple, dipping into phrases and emphasizing surprising syllables in ways that are directly delicate and downright revealing. From the first moments of this luminous album’s first song, it’s clear that she’s reached a new level as a songwriter and performer.
“Tigers Blood,” recorded with longtime producer Brad Cook, finds Crutchfield playing around with some new elements, like the understated but persistent presence of MJ Lenderman (who also performs with Wednesday), another recently minted indie rock titan. who provides guitar work and backing vocals throughout, highlighted by the catchy “Proper Again to It.” Despite minor deviations, “Tigers Blood” functions as a continued extension and development of the Crutchfield aesthetic perfected in “Saint Cloud,” his American masterpiece that stands as one of the few artifacts worth revisiting as of March 2020 .
The sound of that album was so perfectly realized, such a natural fit for Crutchfield, that it’s easy to forget that it was a sly and surprising reinvention, a radiant break from the enchanting fragility of his earlier records. “Saint Cloud” was mostly recorded after she got sober in 2018. On both that album and this one, Crutchfield sounds lighter and more composed, but she’s not relentlessly sunny — “My life has been mapped out to a T, but I’m always a little lost,” she sings on “Lone Star Lake,” a song that imagines a serene escape for its protagonists before unraveling their respective disabilities. And even in his sobriety, Crutchfield still faces the looming specter of addiction, as he does on the spare, beautiful “365” (initially written for Wynonna Judd).
“Bom Again to It,” the album’s first single and perhaps its pinnacle, is indicative of how Crutchfield weaves beautiful melodies and preparations with complicated wrinkles. The verses chronicle a pair’s low points (“If I go out and get in my lane, burning an old flame, turn a jealous eye”), but only as outliers in a relationship with proven longevity: “I was yours for so long. For a long time, we returned to the topic. This dynamic underlies much of “Tiger’s Blood”: Crutchfield isn’t dismissing life’s scarier challenges, she’s simply discovered how you can keep a clear head while she manages them. “It fills me with dread, but I’ve learned to ignore the smell of dust that rises through cracks in the ground,” she sings on the lead track, reflecting a hard-won peace with the world as it is.
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