Consumer Guide Album

Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud [Merge, 2020]
Her guitar parts echoing readymades so approximately and unaffectedly they sound fresh all over again, her soft voice so casual and personable and smart, she's more winning than ever on the love/relationship/self-knowledge songs up front. I enjoy the way "Witches" name-drops her three best friends later on, too. But I can't help but feel or maybe hope that the recovery songs that gather toward the end, while by no means bathetic or self-regarding, are specialty items prized by some but over the heads of most of us, like manga or single malt scotch. Just not life experiences we know much about, even second-hand. A-