Katie Crutchfield, the Alabama-born singer-songwriter behind Waxahatchee, has always tended towards introspection. Over the course of three well received albums, she has traded in the sort of laceratingly honest indie that to the listener feels horribly, yet compellingly intimate. So, the news that album number four is a breakup album, recorded, per the press release, “amidst the dissolution of a noxious relationship”, could cause some concern. Just what self-flagellatory depths are likely to be plumbed here?
We needn’t have worried. Out in the Storm, while as frank as Crutchfield’s earlier albums, also sees her kicking back against the person who wronged her. Musically it offers some of her most robust work to date, her chiming alt-rock melodies ballasted by a full band that includes her sister Allison. There’s also a confrontational quality to Crutchfield’s lyrics, a sense that she’s willing to scrutinise the failings of others as readily as she would her own.
“When you viciously crave captivation, you set the tone / You will mimic a martyr, quiet and left alone,” she snarls on No Question. When she finally cuts ties on album closer Fade, it feels as if a cloud has lifted. “You interrupt, you yell in my face / But you finally hear me say that I’ll walk / I’m walking away.” For Crutchfield it’s cathartic; for the rest of us it’s captivating.
