Week of 10/3: Midwife, Waxahatchee, Los Campesinos!

The weekly newsletter returns! This week, Eric gets sentimental about Waxahatchee, Miranda writes about when songs are openly horny, and Eli explores the stark power of Midwife.

Hello! If you’ve stayed subscribed to this newsletter despite our minimal use of it over the last two years, thank you very much. If you’re new here, welcome! A few years ago, we used this blog as a place to write about songs. Sometimes those were songs we loved, sometimes we wrote about songs we hated, and sometimes we just had something to say about them. We’re going to try to do that again.

Midwife - Droving

Eli Enis:

Lou Reed famously said you only need one chord to write a good song. “Two chords is pushing it,” he warned. “Three chords and you’re into jazz.” I always found that advice funny coming from Reed, since the best of his songs (“Pale Blue Eyes,” “Heroin,” “What Goes On”) were by his own definition prog suites—containing three, four, hell, maybe even five whole chords. Galaxie 500, being the Velvet Underground disciples they were, took Reed’s cheeky rule of strum to heart and truly made several two-chord masterpieces, such as the stunning “Temperature’s Rising” from 1988’s Today. You’d think that 50 years after Reed’s peak and three decades into Galaxie 500’s long tail of slowcore influence, the dual-chord well would’ve done dried up. But here’s Midwife on the stoic and spectral “Droving,” pumping enough life water out of those elemental guitar notes to fill a canal.

Midwife, one of my favorite contemporary guitarist-singers, sounds the way CGI ghosts looked in Goosebumps episodes and live action Scooby Doo flicks. I don’t think of her as a warm-blooded artist, but as a slender, translucent phantom, her skin and clothes colored a watery milk shade of white. Like a curtain that’s been collecting dust for so long that the transient lint and skin cells take up more real estate than actual linen. On “Droving,” she begins by murmuring a “Goodnight Moon”-esque lullaby to her instruments, and then the narrative evolves into fragments that read like candid diary scribbles about the manic emotional pendulum of tour life. “I was never here,” goes one exhale, and then she follows that a few breaths later with, “see you at the next show.” When I interviewed Midwife earlier this year, she talked about rock & roll in unabashedly spiritual terms. She sees herself as part of a greater whole, a mythology of living and deceased rock musicians who she interacts with, consciously or not, through the guitar pickin’ life she’s chosen. All she needs are two chords to tap into that higher consciousness. It’s kind of like what Lou Reed said in that one song: “You know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll.”

Waxahatchee - “Much Ado About Nothing”

Eric Bennett:

As August came to a close, I went with my partner to see Waxahatchee here. It was just a matter of days before our third anniversary, and I couldn’t help but marvel at the timing. The last time either of us had taken in one of Katie Crutchfield’s marvelous live performances was the day before we started dating. I got to watch him cry to “Ruby Falls.” Crutchfield and her backing band at the time, Bonny Doon, fit “Under a Rock” from Ivy Tripp into the lush alt-country sound she’d broken open on Saint Cloud. As we found our seats, I wondered if this second time seeing her would hold as much weight. Just a few lines into “3 Sisters,” those worries melted away. Katie Crutchfield, dressed in white jeans and a red frill top that looked like the curtain behind her in miniature, gold fringe included, is a powerhouse. She and her band, this time made up of indie rock power players like Spencer Tweedy and Twin Peaks’ Colin Croom tore through all of Tigers Blood, and a good deal of Saint Cloud to boot. 

As Crutchfield came out for an encore, she played a new song that Setlist.fm claimed was called “Much Ado About Nothing.” I was swept up in it. I love few things as much as seeing musicians I admire try new music out in a live setting. It forces me to take it in all at once while also trying to cling to every word. It’s an exercise in processing, and frequently leaves me floored. This is how I felt seeing Midwife play “Killdozer” last year, or Wild Pink play “Air Drumming Fix You” days after ILYSM dropped. On Tuesday, “Much Ado About Nothing” came out officially, and I can’t stop listening to it and running it back again. Soft guitars cradle Crutchfield’s lilt as she unleashes some quietly biting lines. Like the thorns on the yellow roses she’s watching die, she thinks of herself as prickly, dangerous, and unlovable. The push and pull of love runs throughout songs like “Lone Star Lake” and “Right Back To It”, and this would have fit right in with them. Instead, the tiger's blood snow cone is discarded and left to melt on the parking lot concrete. “Much Ado About Nothing” is a messy, brilliant capstone to the most unbound Waxahatchee album yet.

Los Campesinos! - “By Your Hand”

Miranda Reinert:

I’ve been listening to Los Campesinos! a lot lately. Half of that is because of a new album and seeing them play earlier this year, but half is just because I found myself on a no-internet 6 hour drive up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I have a lot of their songs downloaded to my phone. I listen to them a lot on airplanes too for the same reason. “By Your Hand” is one I’ve been returning to and I think it’s probably the second best song on Hello Sadness, but I’ve been thinking about it mostly because “Juno” by Sabrina Carpenter has been rolling around in my head since I first heard it. 

There is a certain kind of courage in writing about sex in a way that is so horny it completely circumvents being sexy. My reading of the Sabrina Carpenter song is that it’s not just about being so horny she’d let this man cum inside her. It’s about being horny in a way that tricks you into thinking it’s concerned with capital L Love. This thing where you’re not in love, but you’ve created a whole fantasy of a future that is driven predominantly by being so fuckin horny. It’s funny and it’s beautiful and it touches cringe in a perfect way.

“By Your Hand”  is kind of like that to me at a slightly different stage of a relationship— still funny, still touching cringe, still horny, but later. One time I made this sort of alignment chart of indie rock bands where the X-Axis went from awkward to sexy and the Y-Axis went from celibate to horny. Los Campesinos! was slotted in the very top left at the highest extreme of awkward and horny. I don’t know that awkward is the right word (nor the one I would use if I was to make this chart again), but they have so many songs that live in that realm of so horny it passes right by sexy in the traditional sense. There is confusion in the horniness here— the nature of a relationship, the desire for it to be more serious maybe but maybe not. There is the horribly horny phrasing of “eyes of doe and thighs of stallion” and the image of hooking up with someone only for them to vomit down the front of your nice clothes— an image only conjured up by one other song I can think of.

It’s not the horniest of the LC! songs, but I like the way it is horny and tragic. A lot of songs start at the beginning of a relationship or the very end— the Sabrina song is the beginning, a true break up song or betrayal song is the end— but Los Campesinos! writes a song for about 75% the way to the end of something. Nothing like it.