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’.
It’s one of the simpler lyrical constructs of that song, or any other of Saint Cloud’s. The richness of expression, a rain of metaphors makes for instance on Hell even the simplest patterns – a strummed guitar, some twangy filling in – almost distracting goodness whilst you attempt to devour the words. There’s a confidence in being this complicated too, lead single Fire gently rocking but in its keyboard warmth nudging as close to pop as this sometimes obtuse vessel has ever been, while Can’t Do Much is road-weary honky tonk but beautiful, a song for a thousand miles of river and firefly nights of pure, blissful nothingness.
Sobriety is more than simply a physical state of course, and the first step is in realising that as an individual you represent something worth saving. On War, evidence of the conflicts which prevent many having that epiphany abound: ‘I’ll keep lying to myself/ I’m not that untrue/ I’m in a war with myself/ It’s got nothing to do with you’, whilst Crutchfield hollers and rolls. Ultimately this is not a confession, but a triumphal declaration of identity.
Knowing yourself again means being comfortable in taking new forms, and the best moments here – the sweetly harmonious Lilacs, Arkadelphia’s desultory charm, the glittering slow dance quality of the title-track – are tokens of a writer taking bold, courageous steps forward. It’s proof that not every dry well lacks magic. Saint Cloud’s backstory is one familiar with the telling, presented throughout history in many forms by the raw-boned female soothsayers of Katie Crutchfield’s upbringing.
Its spurs are in making clean breaks and embracing that past, but whilst the singer’s career will doubtless fork again at some point soon, she’s never sounded more at home.
