-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
ARTIST..: Wednesday
ALBUM...: Twin Plagues
GENRE...: Indie
STYLE...: Indie Rock, Shoegaze, Grunge Pop, Noise Pop, Slowcore
YEAR....: 2021
LABEL...: Orindal
COUNTRY.: USA
PLACE...: Asheville, North Carolina
ENCODER.: LAME 3.100 -V0
BITRATE.: 254 kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo
SOURCE..: CD
TRACKS..: 12
SIZE....: 62.26 MB
URL..: http://www.facebook.com/WednesdayTheBand/
- TRACKLIST
1 Twin Plagues 4:08
2 Handsome Man 2:28
3 The Burned Down Dairy Queen 3:08
4 Cliff 2:40
5 How Can You Live If You Can't Love 3:02
How Can You If You Do
6 Cody's Only 2:31
7 Toothache 2:39
8 Birthday Song 3:16
9 One More Last One 3:19
10 Three Sisters 2:16
11 Gary's 2:11
12 Ghost Of A Dog 2:24
Total Playtime: 34:02
Wednesday is a five piece out of Western North Carolina and Twin Plagues is
their sophomore full length after a handful of EP's and collaborations and a
promising full-length debut in 2019. Karly Hartzman takes care of lead vocals
and unravels tales of fleeting moments in life and paints a portrait of these
events in all their sometimes-horrifying glory. These moments unravel
throughout a record that travels between moments of swelling noise/distortion
and heartfelt twanging/aching folk that blends so well in the listening
experience. Wednesday manage to incorporate so many emotions in new and
winding ways, taking you down pathways that lead to delight after delight
over these ten songs.
"Cliff" is powered by Hartzman's vocals which carry an emotional weight that
holds its ground against the whirling pedal steel guitar of Xandy Chelmis and
guitar work that leads to a screaming finish. Wednesday work a melody that
grabs your attention immediately between the distortion and the slightly
abstract lyrics that are captivating and delivered immaculately. The title
track is full of thunder and shards of noise laying the foundation for
Hartzman's equally soaring and straining vocals and echoing guitars along
with Jake Lenderman and Chelmis. The swirling discord comes in waves, making
an impact and lending even more muscle to an already furiously pounding
instrumental storm.
"How Can You Live If You Can't Love How Can You If You Do" is change of pace
on this record with its stunning melody aided by swooping pedal steel
flourishes and slowly picked guitar lines as Hartman weaves an aching tale.
This is a moment of masterful aching beauty, a piece of songwriting that uses
space and expertly crafted lyrics. "Ghost of a Dog" is another slower paced
yet extremely powerful use of emotions and quiet, almost minimalistic,
atmosphere that shows off the nuanced charm Wednesday use to full effect.
They tug at the heart in an unfortunate tale featuring a tormenting
apparition of the canine persuasion and trauma/grief as Hartzman's voice
breaks and cracks throughout.
Twin Plagues hones the strength and craft Wednesday have shown on previous
releases and shows a band that is hitting the mark on all of its aims. The
songwriting of Hartzman has a guile that goes well beyond what one can or
should expect from an artist and band that is in a relatively young stage.
Wednesday play with the loud/quiet dynamic in an exciting manner, adding
their own unique touches and techniques to push their music in new and
exciting directions that show themselves in every track. This is a record
that will present something different on every listen. There is something
here that will have you returning to it over and over again, leaving you with
a smile on your face while doing so.
*
Asheville, NC-based five-piece Wednesday are purveyors of what some have
termed "Southern Shoegaze." It's a description that makes perfect sense on
their viscerally chaotic second album Twin Plagues. On the one hand you have
tracks such as the gloriously propulsive "Three Sisters" combining layers of
swirling distortion punctuated by frontwoman's Karly Hartman's sweet
plaintive vocals. At other times Wednesday dial back the noise and woozy
washes of sound in favor of chiming slide guitars, which is exemplified on
the likes of the beautifully bruised alt-country on "How Can You Live If You
Can't Love, How Can You If You Do."It's this ability to switch pace from
intimate tender Americana to thundering sonic juggernauts that often owe
something of a debt to My Bloody Valentine that make Twin Plagues such a
compelling and at times unsettling listen. It's not just the dynamic sonic
tonal shifts that draw you in, it's also Hartman's ability to finds pain and
beauty in the banal minutiae of everyday life. At times her lyrics seem like
wispy clouds, barely formed and yet still have the power to convey an
atmosphere. Whether it's the surreal image of "the cartoon crucifixion on a
ceiling beyond suffering" on the scything "Toothache" or the fading breath of
a lover on the bathroom mirror on "Cody's Only," Hartman's succinct lyrics
pack a sizable punch.
Wednesday's vignettes of small town life-populated by characters such as
toothless chain smoker hooked up to an oxygen machine ("Gary's") or "a
neighborhood kid with a fucked up buzzcut" ("Handsome Man") often convey an
atmosphere of creeping dread and the sense of a search for meaning in world
that seems random and indifferent. The album closes with a particularity
eerie version of Edie Brickell & New Bohemians' "Ghost of a Dog," which feels
a like fitting conclusion to an album that seems to take its lead from chaos
and decay, from loss and longing but also of the need to reconnect with the
world.
*
On its second album, the Asheville five-piece goes big and loud, scaling up
its shoegaze-indebted sound while frontwoman Karly Hartzman buries an
undercurrent of anxiety beneath the clutter.
Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman has a crowded head. "I'm honestly trying
to forget and move on, rather than hold onto these memories. I'm writing
about them to let them go," she once professed. Hartzman wades through these
lingering impressions at a slacker's pace in the band's sophomore album,
turning heads with each extraordinary afterimage: a burned-down Dairy Queen,
an acid-induced window escape that results in a broken foot, the warm breath
a lover leaves on the bathroom mirror. On Twin Plagues, the Asheville
five-piece goes big and loud, breathing second life into the things (and a
dog) that refuse to die, curling secondhand wisps of sound over and under the
living world with remarkable, unexpected beauty.
Hartzman covers a lot of ground, splitting her time between brash,
head-banging lines about the Beach Boys and reverb-drenched moments of
intimacy: "At night a stone/Alone/Faking Sleep/I won't fool you," she sings
in "One More Last One," a classic shoegaze cut that could have been pulled
straight out of Loveless. In Hartzman's universe, even the most callous of
objects come alive. The wall cares so much as to wince, while the floor's
proximity to her lover makes Hartzman jealous. Meanwhile, Jake Lenderman's
animated guitar meets this world head on: A breathing, kicking creature, it
squalls all over and piles up heaps of feedback.
Fuzzy, distorted riffs are a constant presence on Twin Plagues, layering atop
one another two, three times over. Hartzman elbows through the chaos a little
like Snail Mail's Lindsey Jordan did on Habit. But while the latter revels in
cathartic emotional displays, Hartzman's own feelings are more delicately
tucked away. An undercurrent of anxiety runs beneath the clutter. Recurring
reminders of a real-life car crash follow the record like its shadow. And as
pointed as her writing is, Hartzman frequently shrinks into generality when
she writes in the first person. Names turn into pronouns; objects lose their
outlines: "Couldn't laugh at it yet/Wasn't far away from it yet," or "There's
something moving over me/I want to remember everything." That loss of
specificity, rather than dampen the strength of her songwriting, injects
another dimension into it-there's a sense that we are catching Hartzman right
after the moment of impact, transfixed in a state of shock or paralysis,
whether that's in the aftermath of trauma or a heartbreak in which "the pain
was kinda wonderful cause it was so complete." That pain, the devastating,
ineffable immediacy of it, is perhaps the most striking aspect of the album.
Twin Plagues can feel relentless, almost interminable. After all, this is a
record haunted by its own becoming. Hartzman's vocals are often submerged
underneath the noise completely, crushed by its weight. Occasionally, she
breaks through the surface in slower ballads like "How Can You Live if You
Can't Love How Can You if You Do," where a folksy twang adds welcomed
variation. One might charge, perhaps, that those moments are too few. In
"Three Sisters," things start to get lost within the folds of a dense blanket
of sound. But the issues on Twin Plagues are minor. Like Amanda, in "Gary's,"
who was "screaming something at her boyfriend that we could not make out,"
Wednesday leave behind something-something we'll remember even without all
the details.
*
Indie rock is alive and well with the Asheville, North Carolina band
Wednesday. On their sophomore album, Twin Plagues, the quintet turns up the
amps and make a glorious guitar fueled album that is driven by vocalist Karly
Hartzman. The band still uses their shoegaze skills found on their debut but
now takes the distorted fuzz to a new level as both the guitar and Harzman's
vocals get a much brighter spotlight.
The record actually starts off with what I would consider a continuation of
their previous work as the title track is a very heavy handed shoegaze song
with its smoldering build up of feedback before Hartzman comes in and helps
push the song along. Its whirlwind moments of reverb are the perfect
transition as the record moves to the next track. When "Handsome Man" comes
on - you immediately hear the group's evolvement. Hartzman is now in the
front seat as her vocals hang on their own between the big seesawing riffs.
"Burned Down The Dairy Queen" is next and walks a slower pace with a big
crashing instrument finish but I hear more early Liz Phair than My Bloody
Valentine. These small tweaks to the formula create a much more engaging
record compared to their debut.
Twin Plagues has a new indie feel to it with lyrics that pull you in as
Hartzman fits into a contemporary bunch like Stef Chura, Katie Crutchfield
and Courtney Barnett. The guitars can be crushing at times which I really
like because Wednesday can flex some serious muscle and the album is better
for it. Wednesday shows a bridge between shoegaze and indie rock on multiple
tracks here but while on the ballad "How Can You Live if You Can't Love How
Can You if You Do" the band inserts a little bit of twang that not only shows
another side to the group but is a stand out moment on Twin Plagues.
Wednesday is an easy band to get behind if you like your guitars to crunch.
The band is extremely confident on all 12 tracks and leave you with the
exciting thought that there is more where that came from!
*
In a long and emotionally exhausting year of being inside (alone, in my
case,) I have found myself thinking about mirrors. How to avoid spending too
much time in them, most days. Taking inventory of the real, physical self is
difficult work, work that I'm not entirely opposed to but work that became
immediately more treacherous for me when I had to witness the very real toll
that time, modern anxieties, isolation, and boredom were taking on me. It was
easier, it seemed, to spiral into a not-so-distant glorious past, to use
memory as a tool of both excitement and healing.
But, speaking of excitement, I like to stumble towards a band with no agenda,
no purpose, uncovering sound almost on accident. This is how I first heard
Wednesday. The band came to me and I don't remember how, or why. They simply
arrived, as if we'd been traveling toward each other our whole lives. I Was
Trying To Describe You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in
sound, in spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it took me
back to an era before the current era, which I'd needed at the time. The past
can feel less hellish than the present if we are, sometimes, not fully honest
with ourselves.
There is the trick of nostalgia that I spend a lot of time playing with in my
own writing, and somewhat tormented by in my own living. The very real idea
that nostalgia is both a useful tool and also a weapon if it isn't paired
with something that approaches a type of rigorous honesty. Which is hard to
do, sometimes. My memories flare and fire with only the finest aesthetics of
a past that I was certainly in, but I often deem myself as only a secondary
character, if even that. Which, of course, lets me off the hook in the name
of fluorescence and flourish, in the name of sound and sight.
I love Twin Plagues first for its songs, plainly. If you, listening to
Wednesday for the first time around or even the second time around, stumble
onto this album, I promise you the songs will be what grab you first, beyond
any of my foolish high-level emotional theorizing or projections. Every band
that loves the pursuit of their craft the way this band does is one to
follow, because getting to sit on the sidelines and watch them level up is a
real generosity. Twin Plagues is overflowing with hooks, but what most
delighted me about the band from the start has taken a leap: they have
managed, somehow, to get even better at structuring their noise from one
movement of a song to the next. The idea of the "song" itself is flexible in
their hands, so much so that each song holds two, or three songs within.
This, again, generosity. "Cody's Only" is a ballad until it begins to
threaten a storm of volume, and then, in its final act, it becomes something
else altogether. "One More Last One" is a shoegaze-y trip that swells and
swells until it overflows, but it doesn't stop. It keeps offering and
offering and offering. I say "noise," and never in a dismissive sense.
Everything has a place, and so much of its place is to serve the true heart
of this album, and the true heart of Wednesday's music, which is allowing
cracks through which tenderness can enter and exit as needed. Tenderness
that, it seems to me, is always wrestling underneath whatever else might be
happening on a song's surface.
But if I may go back to all of these ideas of nostalgia and our old, tricky,
past selves that are, indeed, a part of the house of bricks that make up our
present self, what I also hope you, listener, might adore about this album is
the exact moment at the start of "The Burned Down Dairy Queen" when Karly
sings I was hiding in a room in my mind / and I made me take a look at
myself. Because if you, like me, have been avoiding mirrors - both
metaphorical and real - this is where the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing
bright across the darkness of my otherwise dark and empty chambers. So much
of these songs meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have
found myself meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the
recalibration that this album provided. I was desperate for making myself
less blurry in my own memories and reckoning with my full, multitudinous
self. The self that was once unkind, or less gentle, or less curious than I
am now. I needed this album to remind me to embrace the fullness of my
unfinished nature, the years I have lived and - with any luck - the years I
have to go.
So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows on a
comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the
volume up when "Birthday Song" gets good and loud and sing-along-able. You
might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the
ground, and let "Ghost Of A Dog" churn and rattle you to some nighttime
realization that you couldn't have had in silence.
But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the mercies
that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think, too, that it
will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of many reflections.
All of them deserving patience.
*
What does "indie rock" even mean? This has been a subject of much contention
over the years, especially as the term has come to encompass music neither
released on an independent label nor particularly rock-oriented in genre.
There's a lot to think about there for people who gives a shit about such
distinctions, but the simplest answer is that you know it when you hear it.
And to these ears, Wednesday are as indie rock as it gets.
Full of hard-hitting, guitar-powered tracks and released on Chicago-based
Orindal Records (home of Julie Byrne, Advance Base, Gia Margaret, and Dear
Nora among others), Twin Plagues - the new album from Asheville quintet
Wednesday - qualifies objectively as independent rock music. But Karly
Hartzman's band also taps into a certain ideal of the genre as established in
the late '80s and early '90s: shrouded in fuzz yet melodic and approachable,
sometimes lackadaisical but occasionally explosive. Think Pavement. Think
Sonic Youth. Think Cat Power. Think of that iconic Dinosaur Jr./My Bloody
Valentine tour that deafened Gen X hipsters across America, of Yo La Tengo
and Liz Phair and the Breeders. You know: indie rock.
Bands have been revisiting such foundational indie sounds again for a good
solid decade at least, if they ever stopped. At this stage of the nostalgia
cycle - after a decade that started with Parquet Courts and Yuck and ended
with Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, with no shortage of '90s throwbacks in
between - if you're channeling these influences, you'd better be throwing
heat. Fortunately, Wednesday have delivered a scorcher. These 12 songs feel
dangerously volatile, like the distortion might actually leap out and burn
you if you come too close. They're just as weighty when they quiet down, as
if burdened with a world-weariness that refuses to dissipate. Chalk it up to
Hartzman's vivid, vulnerable writing, as well as the crunching down-tuned
guitar riffs she and Jake Lenderman unleash throughout. And save some credit
for producers Alex Farrar and Adam McDaniel, who've ensured that everything
sounds bracingly visceral and raw. Even songs like "Handsome Man" and
"Toothache," so accessible and melodic that you could almost slide them into
an old MTV Buzz Bin compilation, course with urgency and barely contained
chaos.
If Wednesday initially scan as yet another band working in a well-traveled
tradition, they quickly begin to stand out for the unique way they swirl
disparate aesthetics into that old slacker-rock template. The emphasis varies
from song to song: They occasionally edge up to monolithically gloomy
alt-metal, as on the absolutely filthy title track; there are frequent doses
of shoegaze (best exemplified by "One More Last Time") and its close cousin,
noise-pop (behold the gorgeously discordant racket on "Three Sisters");
between Hartzman's baked-in North Carolina twang and well-placed lap steel
flourishes from Xandy Chelmis, there's a lot of country in the mix,
particularly on sparse ballads like "How Can You Live If You Can't Love How
Can You If You Do."
*
Twin Plagues is the fuzz-fuelled sophomore offering from North Carolina's
Wednesday, showcasing them at their genre-hopping best. From the frantic to
the bewitching, Twin Plagues 35-minute journey will only leave you wanting
more.
Rewind back to the late 80s/early 90s and the first time you heard Kevin
Shields and his now unmistakable wall of sound (full disclosure: it was
another 17 years or so before I would get introduced). Since then, the
comparisons to My Bloody Valentine and their peers have been relentless. All
it takes is an offset Fender, a fuzz pedal, and a reverb pedal, and suddenly
your release is the next Loveless. Whilst many have tried and some have
succeeded, few have managed to have that immediate kick to the the stomach in
their releases that helps them stand out from the crowd. Step forward
Asheville's Wednesday. Following the release of their debut album I Was
Trying to Describe You to Someone, Wednesday have continued to develop their
shoegaze/lo-fi inspired sound, building upon a solid fanbase with a steady
stream of single releases. Not content to rest on their laurels, the North
Carolina outfit continue to experiment with genres on their latest release,
taking things to new levels.
-=- SHGZ -=-
-=-=-==-=-=-
Shoegaze
is a genre of alternative rock that
originated in the late 80s. The genre is very
difficult to define, and it is even more difficult to evaluate music
within it. Generally, the genre is characterized by its
shimmering vocals, reverberating guitars, and
textural distortion that create
a tranquil, opaque
feeling.
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