In the press interviews leading up to the release of Tiger’s Blood, Katie Crutchfield’s latest for Anti under the artist name Waxahatchee, the artist made it clear that she wanted to step away from the tortured artist model of creation and reception. The songs and themes explored move further away from the edginess of Out in the Storm, a cathartic but harrowing effort from 2017. In this sense, it follows the thread of her 2020 recording Saint Cloud. As on that album, Brad Cook produces, at Sonic Ranch Studios in Texas. The sound blooms; Tiger’s Blood is the most polished of Crutchfield’s albums to date.
An excellent group of supporting musicians are on hand. The guitarist MJ Lenderman navigates the delicate balance of acoustic and electric instruments with a clean electric sound, and economic, skilful solos. The songs are further fleshed out by banjoist Phil Cook, Brad’s brother, and drummer Spencer Tweedy.
Crutchfield has a glorious voice that has only improved with experience. When I reviewed Plains, her duo project with Jess Williamson, for Dusted, I remarked that, “Crutchfield and Williamson singing together create magic.” Magic is created by voices here too. There are few songs where the lead vocal isn’t accompanied by backing vocals: overdubs of Crutchfield and help from her collaborators. A song like “Evil Spawn” has an excellent hook, but the incorporation of multiple background singers really makes its arrangement attractive. “3 Sisters,” appropriately, over the course of the song builds to 3-part harmony. The title track and album closer gets help from a chorus of enthusiastic voices.
Songs like “Ice Cold” and “Bored” bring the music closer to the rock end of the country music spectrum, a popular place currently to reside. Crutchfield’s attachment to roots music is also on display, with “Right Back at It” spotlighting Phil Cook and pedal steel adorning “Crimes of the Heart.”
True to Crutchfield’s word, Tiger’s Blood is an album that avoids bathos. That doesn’t mean that strong emotions are absent. In “Burns Out at Midnight,” she confronts angry impulses. “365,” one of the album’s singles, is about a toxic relationship. She sings,”I catch your poison arrow, I catch your same disease, Bowing like a weeping willow, Buckling at the knees, Begging you please.” “Crime of the Heart,” about another devolving relationship, rhymes the title with,”you’ll rip yourself apart.” The music denies any sense of wallowing, even sounds upbeat, suggesting that this relationship may be in the rearview mirror soon enough.
Tiger’s Blood doesn’t have a weak cut on it. One imagines it will be in heavy rotation for many long after its release.
Third Coast Percussion — Standard Stoppages (Cedille)
Nominated for two Grammys, Third Coast Percussion’s recording Standard Stoppages was part of the group’s twentieth anniversary celebrations. The group has long advocated for contemporary classical music, commissioning projects that have done a great deal to expand the repertoire for percussion ensembles. Standard Stoppages consists entirely of new works made by collaborators old and new to TCP.
Jlin is best known for her footwork output, but recently she has been working with artists in other genres. Please Be Still is a brief, charming work that translates footwork into percussion ensemble music, moving electronica signatures into the realm of acoustic instruments.
Tigran Hamasayan fully embraces mallet instruments in his Sonata for Percussion, with patterning of folk melodies creating vibrant shimmering timbres. Cast in three movements, “Memories From Childhood,” “Hymn,” and “23 for TCP,” the sonata was clearly tailor made for the group, and their assured performance underscores this spirit of collaboration.
Zakir Hussain wrote Murmurs in Time, his only piece for classical percussion ensemble, for TCP. Tabla playing is featured prominently on the recording. Hussain recently passed away, and the work honors his legacy as a virtuoso performer and creative artist and gives the listener a poignant glimpse at what could have been a more extended, fruitful collaboration with TCP.
Jessie Montgomery’s Study No. 1 uses a diverse range of instruments, successively foregrounding different subsections. There is a sense of inquisitiveness in this heterogenous deployment. Montgomery focuses more on melodic and harmonic details than textural variety in In Color Suite.
Musekiwa Chingodza’s buoyant singing voice is featured on his piece Dzoka Kumba Referencing Zimbabwean traditional music, Chingodza’s mbira (thumb piano) playing is underlaid with syncopated polyrhythms from a drum set, mallets, and metallophone instruments. It is a stirring close to a multifaceted, eminently satisfying recording.
As previously mentioned, one of the things that came about after Dusted mainstay Jennifer Kelly's cancer diagnosis was a Bandcamp compilation in her honour. Per Jenny's wishes it is free to listen and download to; details (and links to most of the contributors) are all over on the Bandcamp page. Thanks to everyone who contributed (including several Dusted comrades), and everyone who listens.
(There was also an amazing benefit concert for Jenny recently, you can see some pictures on the Dusted Instagram, for example here.)
Pan•American — Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane (Kranky)
An aura of motion pervades Mark Nelson’s latest album, as rhythms shimmer and electronic (or electronically altered) sounds sparkle like broken glass. When I reviewed 2022’s The Patience Fader, I observed that, “Pan•American slows time to a liquid crawl,” but this latest set of songs nudges the clock forward subtly. “Entrance to Afterlife” booms with the album’s most emphatic drumming, a marching band just out of earshot as ecstatic synth washes surge and recede. Yet drum rhythms chitter and glitch through even the most ambient, atmospheric cuts here, jabbing “Heaven’s Waiting Room” with an elbow, hissing and popping through “Silver Tramway (In Snow)” to keep things moving.
That’s perhaps in line with Nelson’s statement that he wrote these songs about travel. He says he means both ordinary, physical travel (of the “get in the van, man” variety) as well as more metaphorical life journeys. Still, you have to sense the balance tipping towards the mystical when three of the ten track titles refer to the afterlife (and four if you count “Taxi to the Terminal Gate”). This last one is full of long, lucid sounds, some breathy and organic and wood wind like, others polished to an electronic gleam; a subtly clicking, scratching rhythm ticks on through all this, as water washes through in big splashes.
Mallory Linnehan, who performs as Chelsea Bridge, is the only other musician besides Nelson on this album. You can hear her violin in “Silver Plane, Now Boarding,” a mournful, Celtic skirl, rough as wool against the pristine hyper-reality of the guitar and electronics. Her voice turns up in “Death Cleaning” alongside Nelson’s in a lovely murmuring interval, introspective and dream-like.
Yet it is mostly Nelson, pushing past his normal slow-blooming, guitar atmospherics into a lighter, brighter, more electric future. It is mostly pretty subtle, but effective at higher doses, too, as in the punching, rolling, Talk Talk-by-way-of-Adrian-Sherwood, “Entrance to Afterlife.” It sure doesn’t sound like Pan•American, but oh boy, it moves.
Tinariwen’s desert blues has always evoked a nomadic way of life with swaying, caravan-like rhythms, its bright guitars and its hazy, distance-crossing vocals. Despite the Grammys, the world tours, the genre-crossing, star-studded guest cameos, the band, at its best, has always sounded like a group of dusty brothers-at-arms, bivouacked down for the night, campfire smoldering, the music carrying though empty dunes, reaching, maybe, all the way to home. And indeed that’s how they started, around a pair of Tuareg warriors temporarily enlisted in Qaddafi’s army, fighting in northern Mali and southern Algeria during the day and making music at night. Tinariwen’s members have experienced the worst of the global migration crisis, in war, displacement and closed borders, but also the best, bringing their hallucinatory grooves to Europe, North America and Asia and accumulating global fan base.
This latest album comes as Tinariwen is barred from playing its planned string of 2026 shows in the United States, thanks to racist travel bans, but the band is busy elsewhere, performing before thousands in India and making the rounds of the European capitals. That’s our loss—and also theirs. They could use the money. We could use the dreaming, drifting, hip-moving transport that a live Tinariwen can provide.
Meanwhile, we have Hoggar, a stripped down iteration of the band’s hand-clapping, intricately rhythmed, head-nodding art. There are fewer guests than usual, just long-time collaborator José González and the Sudanese singer and oud player Sulafa Elyas and some younger players from Mali and thereabouts. Elyas’ “Sagherat Assani” is a long-time favorite of Tinariwen’s musicians. They first learned the song in a Sudanese/Libyan border town and played it as they travelled throughout the sub-Saharan region. Now Sudanese native and current French exile Sulafa Elyas accompanies them on the piece, her sweet trilling voice and delicate oud figures giving it a lightness that belies the suffering in that war-torn region.
José González puts his mark on his cut, “Imidiwan Takyadam,” partly by singing his verses in Spanish, his light, gamboling guitar in contrast to the droning smoke and shimmer of Tinariwen’s parts. The song puts the immigrant’s struggle in global context, considering not just the African places left behind, but the unfamiliar European villages where refugees may find themselves. Says Tinariwen founder Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, “This is a song I wrote long ago, yet today its echo feels stronger than ever. It speaks of our people, the Tamasheq, scattered across distant lands, slowly losing the threads of their culture and their ancestral heritage. It is a call to memory and to conscience — a reminder not to forget our brothers and sisters who endure suffering under the tyranny of short-sighted and foolish leaders.”
That’s heavy stuff, but the music is often not. Cuts like “Erghad Afewo” keen and wail ecstatically, the eerie vocals taking you to other, more triumphant places, the insistent rhythms urging your feet and butt to move. A Tinariwen concert is always a celebration, and since we won’t have access to that, the transporting joys of Hoggar will have to do for now.
janainaart
snowghoul
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
germansingergirl