LIVE
WAXAHATCHEE
Kansas City, March 27
Katie Crutchfield marks the one-year anniversary of Saint Cloud with a bittersweet full-band livestream
WHEN “Fire”, the lead single from Katie Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, was released way back in the beforetimes of January 2020, it had uncanny cut-through. It emerged out of new-year playlists and hype parades, and quietly, determinedly rooted its way into your head and heart, like a crocus piercing the early spring snow or a desert lilac creeping up through a crack in the sidewalk.
There was something familiar in Crutchfield’s spare, keening voice – an eerie, timeless lonesomeness you might have first heard on “Catfish”, the opening track of American Weekend. Her debut album was produced in the middle of an Alabama snowstorm 10 years ago but sounded like it could easily have been recorded in riot grrrl Olympia in 1990 or post-punk Cardiff 1979, or dustbowl Oklahoma 1937, or civil war Amherst 1864… But there was a new force too, a sense of the singer reaching down into some native musical bedrock, getting in touch with the country and soul roots she had instinctively turned away from as a wilful, precociously punky teen. It augured well for Saint Cloud, her fifth album, which ended up sixth on Uncut’s Best Of 2020 list.