Waxahatchee – ‘Tigers Blood’ review: Americana stalwart at the top of her game

There’s a track on the new Waxahatchee album, ‘Tigers Blood’, called ‘Lone Star Lake’, in which the narrator suggests her companion ditch the girl who bores him to tears and drive out to the lake with her instead. We get the sense this is a reckless, combustible coupling; underneath this song’s surface, there’s chaos and sadness. Yet the languid bass, banjo and lead guitar cast the song in the colours of that lakeside sunset, luxuriating in them. Like a lot of the songs on ‘Tigers Blood’, it sounds like a romantic memory of a time that was objectively pretty dark but still felt golden.

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Waxahatchee is the moniker of Katie Crutchfield, who started out in the DIY punk band P.S. Eliot before transitioning to lo-fi indie-folk, which gradually became textured alt-country. For her sixth record, she recruited a tight-knit band to help paint those rich, rustic tableaus — including producer Brad Cook on bass and MJ Lenderman, the alt-country wunderkind whose work with Wednesday and his solo project has been some of the best indie music to emerge in the last few years, on lead guitar and vocal harmonies.

The decision to keep things intimate and simple in the studio, letting the band’s stellar and intuitive playing lead the way, makes ‘Tigers Blood’ sing. Crutchfield conjures vocal melodies that are thick with nostalgia or mourning or defiance, delivering cutting turns of phrase (“I swerve in and out of my lane, burning up an old flame”) in her Southern drawl. Lenderman’s presence, particularly on the songs that feature his vocals, is a stroke of brilliance. On ‘Evil Spawn’, he joins the chorus to intensify its triumphant us-against-the-world sneer, while his most memorable contribution is on the album’s standout, ‘Right Back to It’ — his plaintive harmonies make the song ache with romantic surrender.

The titular lines of that song (“I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it”) are delivered with a sense of resignation rather than starry-eyed hope, but with every listen, something about that starts to feel sweeter than if it were the latter. Crutchfield expands on that on the similarly weary next track, ‘Burns out at Midnight’: “Might be good on my own, but I ain’t running away / I wanna chase it to the end”.

These songs offer a more adult and grounded perspective than ones like ‘Lone Star Lake’ and ‘Evil Spawn’; they’re about the person who feels like home rather than the one who gets your blood pumping. It’s a nice counterweight that feels emblematic of ‘Tigers Blood’ — it’s a burning fire, and it’s a warm summer evening at once.