Happy 5th Anniversary to Waxahatchee’s fourth studio album Out in the Storm, originally released July 14, 2017.
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A few months ago, I went to my first Waxahatchee concert. Katie Crutchfield came on stage in a billowy pink dress, in front of a big Saint Cloud (2020) backdrop, with roses around the drumkit. I did some quick math: we’d expect her set to be about ninety minutes, and Saint Cloud clocks in at a lean forty. It made me wonder: would she play songs from Out in the Storm (2017), the grungy, foggy predecessor to Saint Cloud, with that stage setup? Because if so, we were in for a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Crutchfield must have been thinking about this, too. While Out in the Storm songs did appear that night, they were radically reimagined in the folk-country idiom of Saint Cloud, Crutchfield was purging the sludgy sound of disorientation and loneliness that ran through them. It’s not necessarily a disavowal of that earlier work—I see it as an acknowledgment of the depth of feeling of that album, something difficult to access when in a new phase of life.
My runaway favorite on Out in the Storm is “Recite Remorse,” a somehow catchy, insanely slow autopsy of a relationship that tries to use romantic cynicism (“I saw you as a conquest”) to deny the real feelings of loss that define the breakup (“I was shaking like a leaf.”) It’s an honest window into the way we build little universes in our heads, where certain things are true and everything is on our side, in order to convince ourselves that we were right, that the people who don’t hurt us don’t matter, even though they really do.
Instrumentally, “Recite Remorse” is a grower, one of those songs that springs up from a bed of nothing before the full band is crashing behind Crutchfield on the final chorus. But Crutchfield and co-producer John Angello keep the drums and bass in the back of the mix, behind foggy synthesizer and guitar, to keep the crescendo from seeming like anything more than agitation. It’s not a victorious swell, it’s a deepening of the unease that defines the track. In getting louder, the valley gets deeper.
Other songs on Out in the Storm use a more pronounced full-band sound, like opener “Never Been Wrong.” It’s a deeply layered track with masterful dynamic control; the guitar alternates between chunky, steady eighth-note chords and big, open, distorted ones, making the juxtapositions between time standing still and charging ahead echo the “running to stand still” sensation of emotional turmoil.
The track builds up around Crutchfield as she delivers the album’s thesis statement: “Everyone will hear me complain / Everyone will pity my pain.” This is different from wanting everyone to pity your pain—she maybe sees that this is an unfortunate byproduct of putting yourself on display on a record like this one and is more than anything a testament to the immediacy of the record and how clearly it renders her experience.
Out in the Storm owes a lot to Crutchfield’s punk history, and in some ways feels like a grown-up version of her stellar debut, American Weekend (2012). While her first record was essentially a collection of demos and Out in the Storm is a well-produced, full-band sound, it’s not like the instruments just fell in line behind her voice and everything else remains unchanged. The snarl of the instrumental tracks is what makes Out in the Storm what it is; they’re a key part of the story, not merely support.
Maybe this is most true on “No Question,” a song that Crutchfield sings just a teensy further back in the mix, as if the mania of the jagged instrumentation is the one dragging her along. It’s that feeling that your emotions are the ones driving the train and you have to make sense of them as they go. But then, halfway through the song, the instruments die out, and it’s the vocals that bring everyone back in, and while her voice isn’t any more prominent in the sound, it sure sounds like she’s now in charge.
This is one of those albums that makes you a little uneasy. When it came out, it was clearly an achievement, but also obviously made by someone who was not in a good place. We all know those records: ‘thank you for this gift, are you okay?’ And I’ll admit that part of what makes me feel okay to listen to it and write about it is the knowledge that, yes, things did eventually work out, and she eventually made Saint Cloud.
But at the same time, that person still exists. Even if it’s not Katie Crutchfield, there’s someone who feels the complicated web of emotions that these songs depict. And so even though that pain doesn’t live inside of her right now, it probably lives inside of someone else. So the album serves as a reminder, at least to me, that this kind of heartbreak is always out there, always lurking, and that we do best when we are doing what we can to help people through it.
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