Album reviews: Waxahatchee’s ‘Saint Cloud’ is Katie Crutchfield’s best ever

Waxahatchee

Saint Cloud

(Merge *** 1/2)

Katie Crutchfield left Philadelphia, got sober, and made her best record.

Crutchfield takes her stage name from a creek that runs near where she and her twin sister, Allison, grew up in Birmingham, Ala. She had a productive half decade living in West Philly, where the two of them relocated from Brooklyn in 2013.

But after the 2017 breakup album Out in the Storm, Crutchfield moved back to Alabama, then to Kansas City, where she now lives with songwriter Kevin Morby.

That geographical shift is crucial to the emotionally direct Saint Cloud, which makes Crutchfield’s more diffuse previous work seem guarded by comparison.

On the new album, she carries forth with a clear head, facing hard truths. Musically, she connects to a Southern vernacular, using Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road as a touchstone.

Crutchfield and producer Brad Cook make her music come alive in songs that score direct hits rather than skirt the edges. On “Fire," she sings, “I’m wiser and slower and attuned.” She’s unhurried and self-possessed throughout, without simplifying the struggle. “I’m at war with myself,” she sings in “War.” “It’s got nothing to do with you.” — Dan DeLuca

Waxahatchee’s canceled April 14 show at Union Transfer, 1022 Spring Garden St., has been rescheduled for October. $25. 215-232-2100. utphilly.com.

M. Ward

Migration Stories

(Anti, ***)

M. Ward has had a long solo career but may be better known for his collaborations: as one of the Monsters of Folk with Jim James and Conor Oberst, and as the “Him” to Zooey Deschanel’s “She” in She & Him. He’s an expert folk guitarist and an engagingly laconic vocalist.

Migration Stories, his 10th solo album, is steeped in the sounds of the 1950s. Its cover of “Along the Santa Fe Trail,” a song popularized by the Sons of the Pioneers in 1956, is an explicit tip of the hat to the era. And Ward has filled out the album with tunes of his own that gently lope on fingerpicked guitars, both acoustic and electric, often draped in ghostly reverb.

The mood is sleepy, which is appropriate for songs full of nighttime skies, dreams, and communications with the dead. (Migration Stories often involves transmigration). “Shut the door on yesterday,” Ward croons softly on “Coyote Mary’s Traveling Show,” but Migration Stories finds comfort in evoking the past. — Steve Klinge

Robert Cray Band

That’s What I Heard

(Nozzle Records/Thirty Tigers ***)

Back in the mid-'80s, Robert Cray reintroduced the blues to the mainstream with an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach. At his best, as on his 1986 breakthrough, Strong Persuader, he delivered hard truths in an urbane style that didn’t blunt the emotional punch of the songs.

For That’s What I Heard, Cray teams with producer-drummer Steve Jordan, building on past strengths while also expanding on them.

“You’re the One" and “You’ll Want Me Back” find Cray working the soul end of the blues spectrum and highlighting his similarities to Sam Cooke, which also surface on the straight-up gospel of “Burying Ground.” In a different vein, “This Man” cuts a groove that smolders with a sense of menace.

An economical yet expressive guitarist, Cray fires off succinct solos that punctuate several of these numbers, from the swamp-tinged R&B of “Anything You Want” to the pleading balladry of “To Be With You.”

Meanwhile, with “Hot” and the old-school vamps “My Baby Loves to Boogaloo” and “Do It,” Cray cuts loose with a raw immediacy that gives extra bite to a collection that’s one of his best efforts. — Nick Cristiano