Waxahatchee’s fifth album, Saint Cloud, came out on 27 March 2020, arriving into a changed world. Having made her name on crunchy indie rock, here Katie Crutchfield embraced the country music of her Alabama youth, as well as the storytelling Americana of formative influence Lucinda Williams. It was a full band affair, richly produced and wistful, that was sorely deprived of its rightful live incarnation while gigs were off limits.
That April, a viral tweet from author Jia Tolentino perfectly summed up the experience that Crutchfield’s newly expanded fanbase was craving: “Just imagine … you’re standing in a big warm crowd, two songs into hearing this Waxahatchee album live, your friend wiggles back through next to you and hands you a beer, you say ‘thanks dog I got the next one,’ you take simultaneous sips and go on vibing :’)”
Select UK audiences got something close to that last April, when Crutchfield played two solo shows in east London that dwelled on Saint Cloud and debuted songs from its follow-up, this year’s Tigers Blood. The new songs she played were so indelible, thanks to an idiosyncratic way with melody and phrasing that manages to be both breezy and knotted, that the recorded versions felt instantly familiar to anyone who had heard them live.
Rather than pivot again, Crutchfield refined the Saint Cloud sound on Tigers Blood, and the lyrics – often about overcoming a self-defeating nature, or the rewarding project of long-term love – also spoke to the work of cultivating one’s life over time. Her gift as a writer is to make that hard-won wisdom sound casual, a feeling that resounds through Waxahatchee’s long-awaited full-band return to the UK as the six-piece rolls with ease from one would-be classic to the next.
For the first few minutes of their set at Kentish Town Forum, Crutchfield creates a sense of tension, singing the opening to 3 Sisters all but a capella, leaning into the long, high notes as drummer Spencer Tweedy (son of Wilco’s Jeff) creates a subtle low rumble. But then Crutchfield’s singing relaxes and the band kick in, the effect like water breaking through a levee. The set list mostly sticks to the last two albums, basking in a tour-honed sound that’s burnished and rolling; gorgeous vocal harmonies squeezed like juice from an orange: music for sticking your hand out of a car window and tickling the breeze on a balmy day.
There’s a fine sense of detail, too: the high notes on Can’t Do Much are puppyish and yearning; the gilded, decorative notes at the end of Hell dip into classic Nashville territory; Crimes of the Heart has a smoky twang; the key change in Ruby Falls feels heaven sent. Crutchfield is 35, and her sensitivity to the vicissitudes of mid-30s life attracts a like-minded audience, who sing along to closing song Fire and turn it into a quiet anthem about learning to be “wiser and slow and attuned”. Life’s changes are rarely as dramatic as those of 2020, but the small ones, Crutchfield’s gorgeous music suggests, are equally worth heeding.
