bad tours and good tourists

I’ve been a huge fan of Allison Crutchfield since her response to that annoying pseudo-feminist Noisey article about being “the only girl in the band” (to save you from reading the piece: it’s a tour guide for coooool girls, who aren’t like ooooother girls*). Allison’s new album, Tourist in This Town, is exceptionally great, and not just because it’s a narrative-focused breakup album.**

The overall vibe of the album is one of reflection through untethered nostalgia, which certainly justifies the divine cover art; past events seem clearer when seen from the future, not in an immediate objectivity but in the appeal of being washed clean in the haloed light of nostalgia. No one wants to remember the bad parts of a relationship, and going through the process of measured evaluation is necessary in order to arrive at the detached place where there is room to grow and move on. Crutchfield walks us through the last chords of a relationship in ‘Broad Daylight’, the reminiscence guided by the pulsing drums in ‘Dean’s Room’. The veil is lifted in ‘Mile Away’, as we are forced to reckon with the aftermath grounded in reality, and Allison’s voice rises over the synth to lament “…your prized radical opinions, you assume you understand because your voice is the loudest”. In the end we end up in a stable, if mutually unrecognizable, place. Isn’t that the ideal?

from ‘Expatriate’:
I know people change
And we’re both moving on
I can’t be involved in this, you were my only family
Now you feel foreign in a way, an expatriate

Listen to Tourist in This Town: https://allisoncrutchfield.bandcamp.com/album/tourist-in-this-town

*sorry for the tangent, the misogynistic “cool girl” attitude really rustles my jimmies. Here is the article in question.

**more on my feelings about breakup albums. I feel the need to point out how gutsy it is to write and perform songs about a relationship. Most of us (myself included) would sooner die than expose ourselves to the world by sharing our written ramblings on botched intimacy, regardless of the impact any one person had on our development as individuals.