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Mar 18, 2013The stories of grim wedding scenes, hospital visits, and the various disappointments of daily life are all harrowing and intense, but Crutchfield's deft arrangement of lyrical details and their slow-release impact keeps the darkness from ever coming off as self-indulgent.
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Mar 6, 2013Lesser songwriters might stop there, and accept lyrical maturation as the only necessary step toward a sophomore effort, but Crutchfield also uses Cerulean Salt as a way to expand her sonic palette beyond the crackling acoustic guitar ballads that marked her previous work.
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Mar 8, 2013While the new record represents a considerable leap in ambition, it retains the hand-made, intensely personal quality that defined Crutchfield’s earlier work.
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May 21, 2013It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences.
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Mar 6, 2013While the band’s dichotomy is uncommon, it works because, no matter the ratio of Crutchfield to the band, the emotion’s always pure and unfettered.
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Jun 28, 2013Cerulean Salt represents an outstanding example of that talent blossoming into one of US indie’s most vital and compelling voices.
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Mar 6, 2013Cerulean Salt is a very strong album, frank and blunt and vulnerable.
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Mar 26, 2013Sometimes we believe we care, what happens in the tuneful drywall of her shambling dreams.
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MagnetApr 16, 2013Musically and lyrically, she shares more with Barbara Manning and John Darnielle, able to tell affecting late-night confessionals with sharp attention to detail and very little drama. [No. 97, p.61]
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MojoJul 10, 2013Cerulean Salt's added electricity, rhythm section, variety and production clarity still retains the intimacy, the skeletal arrangements and the plaintive urgency in here delivery, from a yelp to a croon. [Aug 2013, p.93]
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Jul 8, 2013Waxahatchee’s second album is one to immerse yourself in, to lose yourself in and generally marvel at the raw emotion that’s so beautifully expressed.
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Jul 2, 2013Truths rarely come as beautiful as this.
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Mar 14, 2013These songs, short and sparsely arranged, are more fragile. Crutchfield’s hardly beautiful, unadorned singing helps this idea along, and the ways she uses her voice introduce a complicating factor: confidence.
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Mar 12, 2013Some bands’ slightness reveals enough details in the sketches to endlessly pore over, but knowing Crutchfield is capable of great songs and that few here rise to the occasion is frustrating.
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Mar 7, 2013It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes--the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.
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Mar 20, 2013At her best, Crutchfield has a way with concrete imagery that adds a sense of realism to her tales of woe and heartbreak, adding depth and poignance to them, while keeping them from becoming overbearingly personal.
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Mar 25, 2013What makes Cerulean Salt so enjoyable and so endlessly relistenable is that some of her snapshots likely resemble ones from your own lost photo albums.
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Mar 12, 2013While American Weekend had clear standouts in tracks like "Be Good" and "Bathtub," Cerulean Salt manages to maintain a consistently high quality throughout.
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Q MagazineJul 10, 2013A lot to take in, then, but a lethally brilliant concoction. [Aug 2013, p.107]
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Mar 27, 2013the band here helps bring out all the frayed desperation in her voice.
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Mar 8, 2013This is an album of unlikely dichotomies: of confidence and vulnerability, of yearning and forgetting, and of the simultaneous danger and attractiveness of self-destruction.
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Mar 6, 2013The nakedness of Crutchfield’s music is the source of both its confidence and its vulnerability.
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Jun 28, 2013One of Cerulean Salt’s great triumphs is that we believe in these people, the album’s intimacy heightens its sense of realism, its characters feel living.
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Jul 3, 2013These are sad songs, sure; desperately sad, sometimes. But while the connections they depict may be long-severed, that they once existed at all is enough to grace this assured, affecting collection some hope, and an unlikely warmth that seeps in around its blunt, hard edges.
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UncutJul 10, 2013The effervescent punk-pop of The Breeders is a touchstone, as is Kimya Dawson's ramshakle honesty, but "Lips And Limbs" affects a subtle country twang, while on the terrific "Blue Pt. II," skeletal acoustic acoustics and frank lyrics document a stagnating love affair. [Aug 2013, p.79]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 22 out of 26
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Mixed: 3 out of 26
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Negative: 1 out of 26
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Dec 12, 2013
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Jul 4, 2013
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Mar 12, 2013