Twin sisters and former bandmates Allison and Katie Crutchfield’s careers seem fated to converge both inevitably and indefinitely. After disbanding P.S. Eliot in 2011—a band in which Katie played guitar and sang and Allison played drums, and which started when they were both teenagers in Birmingham, Alabama—Allison became the dominant presence in Swearin’, which debuted last year with a self-titled album full of relentlessly catchy DIY pop-punk. Katie reemerged as Waxahatchee, a then-solo project whose first record, American Weekend, sounded like sketches of a breakup sung from the bottom of a well in the dead heat of a humid Southern summer. Allison’s new songs were outsize, like they’d been made to conquer a parallel universe Warped Tour; Katie’s were disarmingly, immediately intimate.
Both records sounded fully formed and drastically different; their follow-ups are less so. On Cerulean Salt, Waxahatchee gains a rhythm section in Swearin’ members Keith Spencer and Kyle Gilbride, hence their touring together making perfect sense. Katie is still front and center, but the expanded arrangements give momentum and rhythmic heft to songs like “Coast to Coast.” Meanwhile, Allison works a lovely and utterly stunning song called “Loretta’s Flowers” into her band’s new record, Surfing Strange.
The Crutchfields’ shared personnel’s tendency to sound like lost great ’90s indie-rock bands and their common aesthetic interests also help to draw out their differences. The best songs from Swearin’ are buzz saws—driven by aggressive rhythms and riffs that propel Allison’s songs forward, as they do on “Kenosha” or “Dust in the Gold Sack.” And if Allison’s songs are full of release, Katie’s contain universes’ worth of tension, delivered in hushed tones nuanced enough to feel painfully real without being overwrought. “Swan Dive” begins with the words “I cling to indifference,” as she details a relationship between two people struggling to continue to lie to each another. It’s a loaded phrase—one that sticks around long after it’s sung—and these songs are full of them.
Though their music found its first home in DIY, and many of these songs could be for and about basements, house parties, touring, and the people who live in that world every day, the Crutchfields are making bracing, universal takes on all of that. Be astounded by the fact that they’re both 24, and know that their best work is probably yet to come. 