Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood Review
Katie Crutchfield cements her country run with the best record of her career.
At a low point during the making of Tigers Blood, Katie Crutchfield, better known as Waxhatachee, and producer Brad Cook were sitting outside the Texan ranch they recorded the album, bordering on meltdown. “I hate this. That sucks! I don’t want to make a record like that!” Crutchfield told Cook.
The day before, MJ Lenderman had laid down his vocal contribution to what would be Tigers Blood’s first single, Right Back To It. It was not Lenderman’s contribution that was the issue, but what Crutchfield and Cook tried to do after it.
Overthinking the question of how to follow up Waxahatchee’s breakthrough album Saint Cloud, a glorious country singed record spurred by Crutchfield’s new found sobriety, had led the pair down a cul de sac of synth heavy pop and programmed beats. Thankfully, the stressed moment in Cook’s garden brought focus and an answer - stick to what had made Saint Cloud so good, brilliantly written songs recorded live with a band.
And so Saint Cloud’s country hum continues into Tigers Blood - sweet, spidery sprigs of electric guitar and dusty acoustic strums accompany us as we join Crutchfield traversing through addiction, love, relationships and the music industry.
On ‘3 Sisters’ we are in a busted-up truck in Opelika, the driver driving like “they are wanted in four states” while Crutchfield laments the music industry she has spent a life inside, “I make a living crying it ain’t fair” she sings over sparse acoustic guitar before Spencer Tweedy’s drums thunder in midway helping a simmering tension to spill over.
On Lone Star Lake we’ve driven to the “The only lake in Kansas” accompanying Crutchfield, a twinkle of electric guitar and a confirmation “I get caught up in my thoughts / For lack of a better cause / My life’s been mapped out to a T / But I’m always a little lost”. It is a subtle and content song, different to where we find ourselves on Evil Spawn, standing in a ‘wild city street’ dodging cars, thieves and diseases while Crutchfield tells us “Take my money, I don’t work that hard”. Lenderman sings backing vocals while his guitar clambers around the song, building it up and bringing it back down again.
Lenderman is a guitar virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist who has found the time to write and record three well received solo albums while also being the guitarist in country/grunge band Wednesday. He wraps his guitar around each song on Tigers Blood. On Ice Cold it twists and churns, on Bored it shreds, throughout its thin, goofy lines climb and wince over the record. He also provides backing vocals on four of the songs, his southern monotone aiding Crutchfield’s lead perfectly, like a breath beneath a feather, helping it on its way. None more so than on Right Back To It, a song that pitches love not as heightened emotion and blazes of glory but as the ebb and flow of a longtime love story, a couple settling in for the long haul “I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it / I let my mind run wild / Don’t know why I do it / But you just settle in / Like a song with no end / If I can keep it up / We’ll get right back to it” they sing together.
Crutchfield’s voice is the perfect companion throughout, showing a remarkable range. On Bored she is angry, a venom when she sings “I can get along / ‘Cause my spine’s a rotten two-by-four / Barely hanging on / My benevolence just hits the floor / I get bored”. The word ‘Bored’ is elongated with all the impatience of a week spent locked indoors. On Crimes of the Heart each syllable slips into the next with a hush “I’m a trusted doorstop or paperweight, taciturn, inanimate”, occasionally giving the final word in the sentence space to be its own, the effect is for the the mundane - cheap wines and pantomimes, to sound like the most heartbreaking things on earth. She repeats the trick on 365, a slow, acoustic ballad that nestles into the final stretch of the record. The verses are sung rhythmically and deliberately, like the only way Crutchfield can get the words off her chest is to read them from a script “365 days / Tell me you’re a wounded soldier / Ya ain’t had too much luck but grace is / In the eye of the beholder / And I had my own ideas but / I carried you on my shoulders, anyways”. But her voice almost breaks when she sings of poisoned arrows, weeping willows and buckling at her knees.
Crutchfield named her album Tigers Blood after the snow cone flavour she ate as a child. We’re with her again in a jeep on the title track she sings “You’re laughing and smiling, drove my Jeep through the mud / And your teeth and your tongue bright red from tigers blood / We were so young for so long, seersuckers of time / Drank someone else’s juice, left only the rind”. Something intense yet sweet. Polarising and innocent, just like her record, which surpasses even the high bar she set herself on Saint Cloud.