WAXAHATCHEE
Sydney Opera House, December 2
SO GOOD. SO VERY very good.
Emotionally vivid and yet never showy, Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee were always fluid in songs that are simply superb even without the charm of connection found in this setting. They moved between rock-with-rustic-characteristics and folk with remnants of church out in the open, between straight country traditions that pull from towns as much as plains and pop that linked America’s northwest and southwest, between the lies of constraint and the unstable promises of freedom.
If it could be summed up in one song it might be the loping Lilacs, that had nothing to do with horses, gods or revelation but somehow made you want to grab them all and run out into the world to show and ask for love by rights. Or maybe it would be Right Back To It whose melody hung like a suspension bridge moving in the wind but still solidly fixed, whose male backing voice (from drummer Spencer Tweedy in a change from the night’s dominant co-vocalist, bassplayer Eliana Athayde), brought languor to the fore even in movement, whose resonator and pedal steel guitars (Colin Croom) danced elegantly around the banjo (Cole Berggren).
Everything Waxahatchee did felt real and reachable, whether it was the vigorous pop thrills of Can’t Do Much, which sings of love while seeing all the caveats, or the country soul of Oxbow where the thought of compromise can’t be enough when “I want it all”.
They offered songs like Crowbar that were chewy with lyrical density, and others like Tigers Blood that had such clarity of imagery you could smell the dust from the floor. They had moments like the sombre but never bleak 3 Sisters, where frankness almost cut (“If you're not living, then you're dying/Just a raw nerve satisfying some futile bottom line/All my life, I've been running from what you want”) and others like Ice Cold which was exuberant, revelling on the edge of self honesty (“You show your face/Keep your eyes shut/Call your own foul/Cheat your own gut”) as much as on the allure of a jangling guitar.
Crutchfield, who arrived in red, topped and tailed with a KC trucker’s cap pulled low and silver boots built high, has a voice that works in the same contradictions/combinations: earthy and yet untethered, ready to pull narrower in Ruby Falls and lighter in 365, pulling up a stool to the side for Crimes Of The Heart and striding out to us in Fire. And more than is obvious on record, there is a strong seam of sensuality beneath it all that draws us in further.
Yes, Berggren’s keyboards were mostly lost except when the electric piano got its dues in Oxbow, and Athayde’s bass could have been boosted in the mix (though sonically, and for general comfort, let’s be eternally grateful this show was not in the on-trend forecourt but in the actual building – I know right, maybe it will catch on.) Yes, we could have done with another four or five (or more) songs even though a full length 90-minute show gave us plenty, and we had no right to be greedy.
And yes, some of us weren’t close enough to get that truckers cap when Crutchfield sent it into the audience midway through the opening song, and maybe we looked resentfully at that person in row D or E. But without any fuss at all, this was one of the best nights of music this year and that is so very very good.
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Waxahatchee play
Meredith Music Festival, December 6
Odeon Theatre, Hobard, December 8
A version of this review ran originally in The Sydney Morning Herald.
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