WAXAHATCHEE 'SAINT CLOUD' LP

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black vinyl LP Check out our full selection of Waxahatchee LPs. On the best album of her career yet, Katie Crutchfield let the country in. The lilt and twang of the backwoods was a lways there in her delivery of simple, gorgeous pop-punk songs shrunk down to singer-songwriter size, but here it's foregrounded and embraced, resulting in a record that feels like a warm autumn day out by the lake. Or, in its sadder moments, like we're remembering those better days along with her. There's the sun-dappled country-rock of "Can't Do Much," the explosive, effusive love-song chorus of "Lilacs," the driving "ramble of a sigh" of "Hell." It's all impossibly catchy and sweetly sad, which we've come to expect, but there's also a palpable sense of fun, even joy in Katie's songs, which are as open-hearted as the arrangements are breezy and seemingly effortless. The album's centerpiece is "Fire," which is for my money the best song she's ever written, a showcase for her quietly amazing vocal range and her ability to tear-jerk with opaque lyrical phrasing that conjures vivid standalone images ("I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky"), and comes with a vocal performance that conjures bottomless emotion. It's a beauty on a record full of such quiet marvels. Show more