Earlier than Saint Cloud, the size of Waxahatchee’s music matched the intimate venues it was typically present in—dwelling rooms filled with buddies, small nook levels, crowded basement venues with iffy plumbing. However on her 2020 album, which Katie Crutchfield just lately estimated doubled the scale of her viewers, she burned the fog off of her preparations and raised her voice. The sound that emerged was nearer in spirit to Americana than late-’90s indie rock.
Generally background modifications can have startling results: Framed on this mild, Crutchfield sounded a bit extra like her hero Lucinda Williams, the tang foregrounded in her vocals. Extra bluntly, she seemed like a “star,” an inexpensive and transactional time period that nonetheless describes a singular phenomenon. There was all of the sudden miles of house round her, and nowhere else to look however instantly into her eyes.
Tigers Blood continues the work of clearing room for this new, 8-foot-tall model of Crutchfield. Saint Cloud producer Brad Prepare dinner is again, surrounding every instrument with a wooly ball of room tone as substantial because the felt pads of a piano. Crutchfield’s character from Saint Cloud returns, as nicely, a sophisticated, warmly combative lady bristling at particular grievances. Probably the most indelible hooks on Saint Cloud got here from a music known as “Hell,” by which Crutchfield sang, “I’ll put you thru hell.” Her voice was rueful and affectionate, convincing you each that she did precisely as she mentioned and that for whoever her goal was, it was value it.
Becoming a member of her this time, on guitars and backup vocals, is the Asheville singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman, whom Crutchfield first invited to contribute to guide single “Proper Again to It” after which requested to remain for the period. You possibly can hear why. Over Phil Prepare dinner’s banjo on “Proper Again to It,” Lenderman and Crutchfield sound like their very own model of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, lifelong musical companions as an alternative of first-time collaborators. Like most indie rock artists within the 2020s, Lenderman’s music enjoys a simple affinity with roots-rock tempos and temperatures, and his rangy harmonies slot neatly behind Crutchfield’s voice throughout a number of songs.
Most of Tigers Blood is powered by the identical roughly strummed acoustic guitar that lit Saint Cloud, with the electrical guitars relegated to enjoying in both smooth shuffles or piquant licks. These ornamental fills put semicolons, dashes, and full stops on Crutchfield’s endlessly barreling ideas. Her thoughts is alive and buzzing, and her language leaps out at you with its starvation. The repeated chorus of “Bored”—a music about making an attempt and failing to maintain your self nonetheless—is, merely, “I get bored.” However the best way Crutchfield sings the phrases feels like a dying sentence, and it’s the one second throughout Tigers Blood’s 12 songs the place that heat voice constricts and turns skinny with concern.
