Live Report: Waxahatchee lands barnstorming brilliance at Vicar St

Donning matching white jeans and t-shirt, Waxahatchee frontwoman Katie Crutchfield saunters on stage at Vicar St with a KC hat nestled over her long, sirenic hair, the heels of her silver boots clicking with every step. The frontwoman ambles over the guitar cables and pedals like a ranchero at high-noon, thumbing the belt loops of her jeans and she clicks the heels of her silver boots. The Lucinda Williams incarnate surveys the sweat-beaten crowd as she kicks off the victory lap of the EU tour for her latest album, Tigers Blood.

Waxahatchee at Vicar Street. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Waxahatchee first came to being as a solo venture, but tonight they’re a well-oiled, road-tested outfit. Crutchfield (on acoustic and vox) is joined on stage by Clay Frankel on guitar and vocals, Spencer Tweedy (that’s the Wilco heir-apparent) on drums, Eliana Athayde on bass, Cole Berggren on keys and banjo and Colin Croom on a hoard of instruments, including pedal steel, harmonica and lead guitar.

Waxahatchee at Vicar Street. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

There’s a tangible chemistry between the six-piece, with sheer joy emanating from the stage as the band launch into the set.

Waxahatchee at Vicar Street. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

As she opens with ‘3 Sisters’, Crutchfield tips her trucker cap and tosses it into the crowd. “You might get lost in the moment,” she croons on the swooning starter. Needless to say, I think we already are.

It’s a common theme throughout the evening that even songs with more delicate arrangements on record are granted extra tonnage in their live renditions. The leap in Crutchfield’s songcraft between 2017’s Out in the Storm and the related decision to get sober in 2018, is reflected in tonight’s setlist. It brings together songs that are effectively all new cuts - nothing pre-2020 - to the live table and unfurls them as a 90-minute-plus parade of enthralling indie-tinged country from beginning to end.

Waxahatchee at Vicar Street. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

The Tigers Blood tracks are especially brilliant. ‘Ice Cold’ hits up a stockier groove of countrified rock with joyful results, whereas ‘Right Back to It’ rocks bluegrass, banjo-laden bliss. But it’s Crutchfield’s astounding gift of the pen that carry the performance, her indelible lyrics wrangling incredibly evocative scenes: the sun as it burns the fog off the summer plains or the “smell of dust that creeps up through the cracks in the floor”. ‘Lone Star Lake’ is a wondrous summation of Crutchfield’s worldbuilding.

You swerve to hit a dead deer
A girl like that would bore you to tеars,
Baby it's cosmic
A caustic buck knife slicing you

The band members are right there with her, their decorative fills adding semicolons, dashes and full stops to the singer’s tumbling stream-of-consciousness. The live arrangements and progressions feel capricious and extempore, but totally natural. With the rhythm section at the helm, the backings aren’t soundscapes as much as they are aural murals graffitied on the sides of train cars, a wonder of passing magnificence one after the other.

Waxahatchee at Vicar Street. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

The encore kicks off into high gear, with Crutchfield introducing the brand-new single ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and, unlike the title, the song is much ado about something. From there, the closer ‘365’ brings the house down. Crutchfield mostly lets her music do the talking, but in brief flourishes, she expresses her gratitude to perform in Dublin before the devoted audience, which, by the way, is one of the loudest I’d ever heard between Vicar St’s four walls. It's a fitting response to such a staggering display of indie rock and country at its finest.

Waxahatchee at Vicar Street. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Check out the full gallery from the concert here. Photography by Miguel Ruiz.