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Before Saint Cloud, the scale of Waxahatchee’s music matched the intimate venues he often found himself in: living rooms full of friends, small corner stages, crowded basements with questionable plumbing. But on her 2020 album, which Katie Crutchfield recently estimated doubled the size of her audience, she lifted the fog from her arrangement and raised her voice. The sound that emerged was closer in spirit to the American style than to the indie rock of the late 90s.
Sometimes changes in background can have surprising effects: Framed in this light, Crutchfield sounded a little more like her heroine Lucinda Williams, with flavor at the forefront of her voice. More clearly, she sounded like a “star,” a cheap, transactional term that nonetheless describes a unique phenomenon. Suddenly there were miles of space around her, and nowhere to look except directly into her eyes.
tiger blood The work of clearing space for this new version of the 8-foot-tall Crutchfield continues. Saint Cloud Producer Brad Cook is back, surrounding each instrument with a woolly ball of ambient tone as substantial as the felt pads on a piano. Crutchfield’s character Saint Cloud Also returning is a complicated, warmly combative woman who bristles at specific grievances. One of the most indelible hooks of Saint Cloud came from a song called “Hell,” in which Crutchfield sang, “I’ll put you through hell.” His voice was sad and loving, convincing them both that he did exactly what he said and that whoever he targeted was worth it.
Joining her this time, on guitars and backing vocals, is Asheville singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman, whom Crutchfield first invited to contribute to lead single “Right Back to It” and then asked to stay for the duration. You can hear why. Over Phil Cook’s banjo on “Right Back to It,” Lenderman and Crutchfield sound like their own version of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, longtime musical partners rather than first-time collaborators. Like most indie rock artists of the 2020s, Lenderman’s music enjoys an easy affinity with the tempos and temperatures of roots rock, and his varied harmonies fit seamlessly behind Crutchfield’s vocals on multiple songs.
most of tiger blood is powered by the same roughly strummed acoustic guitar that ignited Saint Cloud, with the electric guitars relegated to playing with gentle shuffles or spicy licks. These decorative fillers put semicolons, dashes, and periods into Crutchfield’s endless thoughts. His mind is alive and humming, and his language leaps at you with the hunger for it. The repeated chorus of “Bored,” a song about trying and failing to stay still, is, simply, “I’m bored.” But the way Crutchfield sings the lyrics sounds like a death sentence, and it’s the only time tiger bloodThere are 12 songs where that warm voice contracts and becomes thin with fear.