Album Of The Week: Waxahatchee Ivy Tripp

There's an established narrative, a trajectory that the critically acclaimed indie band is supposed to follow. The first album should be the raw, striking, personal howl that comes out of nowhere and builds itself a cult. The second album is where the band beefs up its sound, gets marginally more professional, and really starts to build an audience. On the third album, the band gets a little more experimental, and maybe signs to a bigger label. All the while, the rep grows bigger, and so does the band's font size on festival posters. Maybe satellite radio picks up a song, or maybe a song shows up in a prestige cable drama. That, at the moment, is how careers happen, and it happens so often that it's almost more interesting when a band blows it somewhere along the line and loses that upward momentum. But one remarkable thing about Katie Crutchfield's Waxahatchee has been the way she's hit all those marks in completely organic ways, coming across as an artist who's just finding and developing her voice. Nothing is forced. Crutchfield never sounds like she's reacting to hype. Instead, in the three years since she released her stark acoustic solo debut American Weekend, Crutchfield has pushed and expanded her sound without losing the sense of intimacy or openness of that first record. Her lyrics still read like poetic, fragmented diary scribbles. Her voice still has a conversational longing to it. She still writes hooks, and those hooks are still so homespun and inviting that they don't register as "hooks." And while her emotive bedroom punk rock owes a lot of things to a lot of sources, it still feels like a genre that belongs completely to her.