Wednesday
Friday May 19, 2023
Doors – 730pm
Show – 830pm
with special guests CRYOGEYSER
All Ages Admitted
A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of
the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly
Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much
as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s
new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic.
Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz,
drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-
funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing
skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s
voice slicing through the din.
Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while
listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs
through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with
broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos
and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church
marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish
summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South
hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the
halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of
you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.
Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and
recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough
release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman.
The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman
thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill
your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was
not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really
wanna stay in that zone.”
The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-
of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a
chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-
half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So
Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority – intimate portraits of coping, of
helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs,
skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to
Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while
visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper
traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van,
its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues.
The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way
Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda
Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that
cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived,
right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and
everyone would just go on as normal.
The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life,
blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story
is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are
so fascinating.”
But the thing about Rat Saw God – and about any Wednesday song, really – is you don’t
necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that
really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart,
how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those
tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.
Video Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MawIv5pDFE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0o-hF9s0ro
Ticket Type | Price | Cart |
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Wednesday |