The title of Waxahatchee’s newest album, “Ivy Tripp,” evokes a specific atmosphere, one of nostalgia and nature. The purposeful misspelling of “tripp” speaks to the oddness of the album as a whole.
In listening to “Ivy Tripp,” you’ll be going on a journey, but you might be uncomfortable with some of the things you’ll learn along the way. The track, “Poison,” drops the title in its lyrics after the singer conveys, “You paint it celestial, you paint it serene / What do you want, what do you need?” This is what the “tripp” is primarily concerned with—can you do anything, really, to make someone love you?
More grunge and less folk with “Ivy Tripp,” Waxahatchee has produced a harsher sound that clashes with the band’s established image. Though overall it lacks the beautiful simplicity of past acoustically-inclined albums, it is able to find intimacy with its listeners in other ways. Though the most recent album doesn’t have something quite as rending as “Noccalula,” its songs hit hard in other aspects.
“Ivy Tripp” overflows with sincerity as it tries to conceive of the unbridgeable distance between two people who want to love each other. Frequently concerned with the machinations of intimacy, Waxahatchee narrows their scope to examine a broken relationship as well as the lengths the two involved go to in order to close the space between them.
They ignore, repress and continue on as though nothing has changed. As the singer says in “La Loose,” “And I’ll try to preserve the routine / And I don’t want to discuss what it means / And you’re the only one I want watching me.”
With “Breathless,” Waxahatchee’s album opens with a grating haze of static, the singer’s voice emerging with contrasting clarity. The track introduces the experimentalism frequently featured in “Ivy Tripp.” It is weird and strangely opposed to committing to a set melody. It rejects the notion that instrumentals have to match up with the vocals to make sense. Similarly, “<” begins melodic, but gradually crumbles into a dissonant, intentional mess.
The rough, garage-band feel of the instrumentals juxtaposes with the sweetness and poetry of the lyrics and vocals, emphasizing the contrast between reality and the singer’s earnest words.
Waxahatchee has always been interested in comparing layers of rust and coarseness with those of harmony and saccharinity. The band revels in relatively crude instrumentals so that they may force the spotlight on the dreamy, guileless lyrics.
At times, Waxahatchee pulls back the curtain to demonstrate that they still know how to make the music that made people like them to begin with. “Summer of Love” is both sentimental and biting. It revels in the ideal of a perfect relationship and slowly settles into the idea that that myth is inhuman and impossible. Quiet absolution comes through strongly here, as it does in “Stale by Noon” and “Half Moon,” the latter being the album’s best song.
One of Waxahatchee’s biggest strengths is the band’s firm stance against over-production. Their songs sound real. They sound untouched, authentic and natural. It lends to the candor the band desires to portray.
Artists such as Ariana Grande, Sam Smith and Taylor Swift could not perform these songs to the same effect. Beneath their veneers of production and false image, these artists don’t truly expose who they are, and they likely don’t know how to render themselves in a way so as to portray actual people. “Ivy Tripp” is what it is, and the band is unafraid to move forward in a brutally direct, unmistakably genuine way.
Always yearning to explore the differences that cause relationships to unravel, “Ivy Tripp” is unremittingly honest and often painful to listen to. That’s part of its beauty.
