We’re older; Katie and Allison Crutchfield are older, 36 now. The surprise album Snocaps captures the growing pains, in bouncy, sometimes-country-fried, sometimes-punky, sometimes-elegiac songs. Broadly, the album is about the nostalgia of past mistakes turning into sage advice about aging. Specifically, it’s about cars driving down numbered roads, restless pride, loud bars, muses, being thorny girlfriends, addiction, big dreams, and toxic friendships. This is what well-rooted and courageous music sounds like. “Wasteland” welcomes a hailstorm of danger: “I’m running hot on empty, firing off some willful bottomline / Gave it everything I had, I am hazmat, I am radioactive / Caustic car wreck, off the rails and rude and ruining your life.” “Doom” ought to be one of the biggest damn things Katie’s ever done. Because her writing is so trenchant (“We may fall back into fiction / Know I always do / Make stale of me / No one’s immune”), a splashy arrangement would sound out of turn here, which is why Lenderman’s guitar pageantry comes with just the right amount of humidity.
Two other recent collaborators are rounding out the band this time, MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook. Together they pull from Katie’s country-inflected Waxahatchee material and Allison’s aptitude for punchy indie rock via Swearin’, and split the difference. Like so much of their material both together and apart, the results have the feel of an instant classic.
But what’s most impressive is how good her sister Allison sounds in that same environment for the first time, her singing taking its most-distinctive shapes on “Avalanche” and “Brand New City,” the latter’s riffs and harmonies fluent in P.S. Eliot’s looser indie-rock language. Allison’s musicality has always served Katie well, and it’s refreshing to hear her become fully uncorked on “Over Our Heads”—an 8-foot tall pop-rock song dotted with cursive riffs and a crack of twang. No singles, no music videos, no interviews, no problem: Katie and Allison have brought us a world of good-sounding miracles.
The Fat Angel Sings 