Our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days is Katie Crutchfield’s latest Waxahatchee record Saint Cloud – revisit the review and check out the album via Spotify!
“At its essence, country music has always been about heartbreak and the chance of resurrection, of needing hope for a miracle when it seems none will ever come.”
“After four albums of often finely judged but restless music shaped largely by the Philadelphia singer-songwriter scene around her, Katie Crutchfield has re-imagined Waxathatchee as a sophisticated but more direct, rootstier proposition; just like the strong minded women she listened to as a child who’ve worn the Nashvillian scars, hers has been an emotionally bolder strewn road to redemption.”
“Everyone has their crosses to bear, some people just don’t know what they are. Waxahatchee’s last album, 2017’s Into The Storm, was centered around the breakdown of a toxic relationship, but it took the realisation that she was a better person sober than not to provide Crutchfield with the perspective to make this breakthrough in her songwriting. There’s now domestic solidity too in her relationship with Kevin Morby, the life of being two minstrels locked together celebrated on The Eye; a laconic, sprawling ballad on which the singer pipes, ‘We leave love behind without a tear or a long goodbye/ as we wait for lightning to strike’.”
