‘Ivy Tripp’
Ivy Tripp is an album that proudly wears its ephemerality on its sleeve. There is a sense across its runtime that this is a record of and about moments — moments of joy, moments of sadness, moments of reverie, coming and going, unbidden and out of our control.
The album — the third from Katie Crutchfield’s band Waxahatchee and the group’s first for prestigious indie label Merge Records — ultimately feels like a series of sketches. They’re impeccably well-produced and labored-over sketches, sure, but they’re also self-consciously fleeting, a series of fragments and patches that amount to a musical daydream.
Many songs land well below the three-minute mark. Melodies arrive, unfold themselves into earworms and then depart before you can truly get a handle on them. Ideas are brought up — like the lilting “la la las” at the tail-end of opener “Breathless” — and are then abandoned just as quickly as they come.
Crutchfield isn’t necessarily telling cohesive stories on Ivy Tripp, as she did on Cerulean Salt, Waxahatchee’s (stellar) last album; here, she is fixating on feelings, on memories, on sensory experience — the loathing that comes from looking in a mirror and brushing her hair on “<,” or the bittersweet strains of nostalgia that accompany an old photo on “Summer of Love.”
Ivy Tripp is all about sensation, about the experience of feeling and doing and being. Certain images — sugar, “soda pop,” beachscapes — come up again and again, operating more like impressionistic musical memories than deliberate motifs. Dogs’ barking and radio static underscore parts of the album. “Blue” finds Crutchfield fixating on a phrase (“running water, running”) and playing with it, finding its limits and dimensions, stripping the words of meaning until they feel, rather than mean, becoming another part of the song’s sunny sonic landscape.
There is also a sense of uncertainty that runs across Ivy Tripp, one that lyrically and musically comes to represent transition — from one age to another, from one relationship to another, from indie darlings to biggest band in the world. “Maybe” recurs again and again in the lyrics, be it shouted with triumphant spite on “Under a Rock” or floated as a strangled suggestion on “Grey Hair.” Elsewhere, Crutchfield obsesses over the word “ethereal” and repeats the phrase “I am nothing.”
Likewise, Ivy Tripp is Waxahatchee’s most diverse and musically experimental album to date. Crutchfield plays around with a Casio keyboard on “La Loose” and turns to the piano on “Half Moon” and “Stale Before Noon.” Gone are the DIY bedroom dirges of debut album American Weekend, in favor of a wide range of palettes — soaring post-rock on “Air,” twangy surf guitars on “The Dirt,” industrial synths on “Breathless.” It is the sound of an artist in flux, pushing off against her past as she steps into the future.
The songs of Ivy Tripp could comfortably fill stadiums or dingy basements; Crutchfield’s lyrics, still as achingly personal and incisive as ever, wouldn’t be out of place sung by a crowd of 200 or a kid in a coffee shop. They are songs about feelings being felt — quickly and passionately. And for that, Ivy Tripp, as a whole, is a moment worth savoring.
