The first of this week’s sublime 6 comes from one of the most hard-working singer-songwriters in the game. Katie Crutchfield, who was raised near Waxahatchee Creek in Alabama, skipped town more than a decade ago and struck out on her own as Waxahatchee. Crutchfield says she never knew the road would lead her here, but after six critically acclaimed albums, she’s never felt more confident in herself as an artist, and this is evident on her new album, Tigers Blood. While her sound has evolved from lo-fi folk to lush alt-tinged country, her voice has always remained the same: honest and close, poetic with Southern lilting. Much like Carson McCullers’s Mick Kelly, determined in her desires and convictions, ready to tell whoever will listen.
“My heart is loud,” sings Julia Holter on her sixth album, Something in the Room She Moves, following an inner pulse. The Los Angeles songwriter’s past work has often explored memory and dreamlike future, but her latest album resides more in presence: “There’s a corporeal focus, inspired by the complexity and transformability of our bodies,” Holter says. Her production choices and arrangements form a continuum of fretless electric bass pitches in counterpoint with gliding vocal melodies, while glissing Yamaha CS-60 lines entwine warm winds and reeds. “I was trying to create a world that’s fluid-sounding, waterlike, evoking the body’s internal sound world,” Holter says of her flowing harmonic universe.
During the high vibrancy of autumn 2022, Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker got lucky: at last, everyone could come. Three musical friends – “some of my favourite people” – had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at the forest-hidden analogue studio, Double Infinity. The musicians – Nick Hakim, Mat Davidson and Josefin Runsteen – were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. “I had no idea what the outcome would be,” she recalls. The result? “It was magical,” she says. Adrianne’s musical risk became Bright Future, the studio’s first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
All My Friends, the follow-up to Aoife O’Donovan’s 3-time Grammy-nominated album, Age of Apathy, is based around a collection of songs Aoife wrote, inspired by women’s suffrage and the passage of the 19th amendment. The music is expansive with orchestral arrangements, choral vocals and a variety of instruments that create a sonic soundscape beyond anything Aoife has done in the past. Special guests include Anaïs Mitchell, Sierra Hull, The Westerlies, The Knights and the San Francisco Girls Choir.
Glasgow Eyes marks 40 years of The Jesus And Mary Chain. The album was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio in Glasgow, where Jim and William continued the creative process that resulted in 2017’s Damage and Joy, which became their highest-charting album in over twenty years. What emerged is a record that finds one of the UK’s most influential groups embracing a productive second chapter, their maelstrom of melody, feedback and controlled chaos now informed more audibly by their love for Suicide and Kraftwerk and a fresh appreciation of the less disciplined attitudes found in jazz. Jim Reid says “Don’t expect ‘the Mary Chain goes jazz’. People should expect a Jesus and Mary Chain record, and that’s certainly what Glasgow Eyes is.”
Our release of the week is Elbow’s tenth studio album, Audio Vertigo, which was recorded over the course of 2023 at the band’s home studios, Migration Studios in Gloucestershire and The Dairy in London, and mixed at the band’s facility at Blueprint Studios, Salford. The album marks a significant step change for the group following 2021’s Flying Dream 1. In the words of lead singer and lyricist Guy Garvey, Audio Vertigo was built from “gnarly, seedy grooves created by us playing together in garagy rooms” and is both more direct and more sonically varied than its predecessor.
Click on an image to order your copy.