Review: Out in the Storm by Waxahatchee
How is musicianship affected once an artist is liberated from lo-fi, bedroom amateurism? Katie Crutchfield presents an interesting case study.
Crutchfield is the frontwoman of Waxahatchee, an indie group from Alabama with four full records under its belt. Unlike their 2012 debut American Weekend, which Crutchfield recorded in a week in her Birmingham home, Out in the Storm is the sleek output of months spent at Miner Street -- the famed Philly recording studio home to other indie heavy-hitters, including Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, and Grizzly Bear.
Despite all the studio polish, Crutchfield holds fast to her pet themes in Out in the Storm. The album is ten tracks of pure relationship autopsy. Musically, the record is loud and crusading, anthemic in a way Crutchfield’s older tracks (“Catfish”; “Bathtub”) never aspired to be. American Weekend, sparse and reverb-heavy, depended almost entirely on Crutchfield’s constantly dismayed voice, set to the same four muted chords. If sometimes overwrought and thesaurus-y (“I don't care if I'm too young to be unhappy / Or I recklessly impair this newfangled proclivity”), her lyrics on the debut record tended toward greatness: “We stick to our slow motion memory / It’s 1 in the morning and 90 degrees”.
This is what made Crutchfield better than just good -- she created spaces of nothing and made them brim with grief. She is an imagistic writer with an eye for objects that just barely connote loneliness -- pennies, beer cans, bathtubs, smoke, porches, grass, moons, cigarettes, etc. Crutchfield teeters on being a giant bore, and it’s only her voice -- self-aware and hollow -- that sustains her. It gilds the images on Cerulean Salt and Ivy Tripp; it doesn’t do much for the images in Out in the Storm.
Out in the Storm is a confusing album for a long-time Waxahatchee fan. It’s not genre-bending in the way Cerulean Salt and American Weekend were, but that’s not the objection. Excessive change isn’t the issue either: Out in the Storm is confessional and lovely, much as all the previous records have been. In fact, for those fans who fetishize pathological sadness in their favorite artists (looking at all the Ben Gibbard fans), Out in the Storm may be Crutchfield in peak melancholy form. So, if the changes are reasonable, and all the critical narrative elements are preserved, why does this album underwhelm?
I’d guess it’s because Crutchfield’s voice, for all its shouty hear-me-roarness, is absent of its signature fragility. “Recite Remorse” and “Brass Beam” are the best tracks on the album because they retain the quality that ignited Waxahatchee’s success and early following. A higher production value truly benefits Crutchfield’s lyricism in these two (both are crisp elegies to lost love), and their imprint seems to last longer than the rest. The remainder is certainly foot-tapping, yet generic and familiar. To those who’ve not yet experienced the depths of Crutchfield’s emotionalism, this album is excellent. To the rest of us, corrupted by expectations and idol-worship, I suspect we should all heave a sigh, and heed Crutchfield’s recent request:
“...I have really cool fans. I feel like they will follow me. They'll come along for the journey. I hope. But it is kind of a weird place to be. It's not like I'm a brand new band. I have a body of work, and I have to hold this new thing up next to it and hope that people get it…”
Crutchfield, FADER, July 2017