Lyrically, too, Crutchfield has the courage to follow her own ideas. But show she’s learned to use the studio and an instrument, even if the studio in question is just some old suburban house she rented. Just one album back, Crutchfield might’ve played all these songs as straightforward punkers or acoustic whispers. Halfway into the lament “>,” all these polyrhythmic drums and clanging, weirdly tuned guitars come in and disrupt the vibe so completely that it sounds like the song is falling apart. “ Under A Rock” is a fizzy dream-punk kiss-off with its ragged guitars stinging so sweetly that I have to reach for early-’90s power-poppers Material Issue to find the right parallel. “Half Moon” is just Crutchfield and a piano, and it’s so slow and spare and confident that it doesn’t feel like a departure in the slightest. The organ sustain and ooh-ooh backing vocals and power-chord crashes all feel finely sculpted and expertly arranged. And honestly, I can’t imagine Ivy Tripp sounding any better if she’d recorded it in a proper studio. Some of the album’s songs have such a wall of fuzz that, even if Crutchfield and her collaborators were just multitracking a single guitar, she’ll need reinforcements to make it sound right live. If you had the talent and the wherewithal to learn how, you and a couple of friends could make an album that sounded like this, too.įor this album, Waxahatchee are heading out on tour as a three-guitar behemoth, which makes sense. The album sounds the way it does because Crutchfield and her friends figured out way to make it sound that way. On “Summer Of Love,” we hear a dog barking a few times, and it’s not an added-in sound-effect a dog was just barking when she recorded it. And while the album sounds bolder and more experimental, that’s really just the result of Crutchfield and her collaborators trying out the sounds of all the different rooms in the house, tinkering with things, multitracking Crutchfield’s voice until she was a one-woman choir. Gilbride and Spencer also play in Swearin’, the band led by Crutchfield’s twin sister Allison. Crutchfield, Spencer, and Gilbride all produced the album together. The only musicians on the album are Crutchfield, Spencer, and Kyle Gilbride, the album’s engineer. Instead, she and musical collaborator/then-boyfriend Keith Spencer rented a house in Long Island and recorded the whole album there. Crutchfield recorded Ivy Tripp when she was between labels, figuring she’d just shop it around when she was done making it - so even though she’s releasing it on bigger-indie Merge after moving on from Don Giovanni, she made it without the involvement of either label. But in reality, it’s as DIY an affair as Cerulean Salt, which for my money was the best rock album anyone released in 2013. The album has drum machines and synths and pianos, things that didn’t exist on those last two albums. The guitars sparkle more, and her vocals come through more cleanly and clearly. Ivy Tripp, Waxahatchee’s third album, sounds bigger and more ambitious and expansive than either of Crutchfield’s previous two. She still writes hooks, and those hooks are still so homespun and inviting that they don’t register as “hooks.” And while her emotive bedroom punk rock owes a lot of things to a lot of sources, it still feels like a genre that belongs completely to her. Her voice still has a conversational longing to it. Her lyrics still read like poetic, fragmented diary scribbles. Instead, in the three years since she released her stark acoustic solo debut American Weekend, Crutchfield has pushed and expanded her sound without losing the sense of intimacy or openness of that first record. Crutchfield never sounds like she’s reacting to hype. But one remarkable thing about Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee has been the way she’s hit all those marks in completely organic ways, coming across as an artist who’s just finding and developing her voice. That, at the moment, is how careers happen, and it happens so often that it’s almost more interesting when a band blows it somewhere along the line and loses that upward momentum. Maybe satellite radio picks up a song, or maybe a song shows up in a prestige cable drama. All the while, the rep grows bigger, and so does the band’s font size on festival posters. On the third album, the band gets a little more experimental, and maybe signs to a bigger label. The second album is where the band beefs up its sound, gets marginally more professional, and really starts to build an audience. The first album should be the raw, striking, personal howl that comes out of nowhere and builds itself a cult. There’s an established narrative, a trajectory that the critically acclaimed indie band is supposed to follow.
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