Album review: Waxahatchee

Published 12:00 am Friday, April 17, 2015

Waxahatchee

“IVY TRIPP”

Merge Records

Not all wounds scab. Sometimes they remain red, raw, gaping. Sometimes, after a while, the wound is the thing. If it healed, it wouldn’t feel real.

That’s what a Katie Crutchfield song is like — a gash that never closes up, a cancer that stubbornly refuses to wither, normalized to the point of dullness.

Listen to the stark, beautiful damage on “Ivy Tripp,” the third album she’s released under her solo project Waxahatchee, all of them searing. It’s full of extremely nervy storytelling, the type that indicts the narrator far more than the target.

It is so comparatively easy to heap scorn on others, but Crutchfield has never been one to let herself off the hook. In her songs, the protagonists are almost always causing suffering, and they’re almost always shrugging and saying, in essence, such is life.

“You look at me like I’m a rose” — those are the first words she sings on the album, in a song called “Breathless.” The tone is one of exhaustion and pity. This isn’t a woman who wants to be wanted. She continues: “If I was foolish I would chase/ A feeling I long ago let fade/ And we could be good for days.”

Like many of Crutchfield’s songs, “Breathless” isn’t about defined feeling, positive or negative. Rather, it’s a treatise on the haze that sets in when one state is decaying into the other. The end of the song is a sloppy, almost Björk-like cacophony of ooohs and laaaas over a synthesizer dirge, her hoots competing against each other for attention, distracting from the emotional assassination that just preceded them.

Much of “Ivy Tripp” goes in this fashion. By and large, her universe is populated with people who do damage and then don’t run, but rather laze around and regard the fallout, unwilling or unable to create closure.

The album’s savage core is “Air,” full of muscled, distant guitar and shuddering, angry drums. Here, Crutchfield is again the sighing antagonist: “I left you out like a carton of milk.” Again, she sings with the easy determination of someone who has made a decision but is in no rush, concluding with fatigue: “You are patiently giving me/ Everything that I will never need.”

“Ivy Tripp” was produced by Crutchfield with Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer. For a long while, Spencer has been her boyfriend and collaborator (as a producer, and also in the side project Great Thunder), but by the end of making this album, the relationship was solely professional.

That a breakup happened somewhere amid this elegant debris is noteworthy, but it doesn’t define the album. “Ivy Tripp” is of a piece with what Crutchfield has been doing with Waxahatchee for four years. The only sort of comfort she has ever offered is cold.

ON TOUR: May 1 — Doug Fir Lounge, Portland; www.ticketfly.com.

— Jon Caramanica,

New York Times