-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
ARTIST..: Wednesday
ALBUM...: Rat Saw God
GENRE...: Indie
STYLE...: Indie Rock, Noise Rock, Alt-Country, Slacker Rock, Noise Pop, Shoegaze
YEAR....: 2023
LABEL...: Dead Oceans
COUNTRY.: USA
PLACE...: Asheville, NC
FORMED..: 2018
ENCODER.: FLAC 1.3.1 -8 -V
BITRATE.: 867 kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / 2 channels
SOURCE..: CD
TRACKS..: 10
SIZE....: 232.50 MB
URL..: https://www.wednesday.band/
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1167663910/wednesday-rat-saw-god-review
https://www.stereogum.com/2218236/wednesday-rat-saw-god/reviews/album-of-the-week
https://www.popmatters.com/wednesday-rat-saw-god-review
- TRACKLIST
1 Hot Rotten Grass Smell 1:35
2 Bull Believer 8:30
3 Got Shocked 2:18
4 Formula One 2:52
5 Chosen To Deserve 5:32
6 Bath County 3:10
7 Quarry 4:07
8 Turkey Vultures 4:05
9 What's So Funny 2:32
10 TV In The Gas Pump 2:23
Total Playtime: 37:04
"Bull Believer" may end up being one of the most important songs of the year.
With its two-part narrative, the first half of the song tells the sad vision
of watching someone you know succumb to addiction while the latter half
embraces a bittersweet reflection on teenage years. With every passing line
and gritty guitar passage, the sadness builds and tension grows thicker. Yet
all of this tension is released at once as the gut-wrenching screams of
"Finish Him!" pierce through the cacophony of instrumentation as the narrator
comes to terms with the person they are today. It's beautiful, emotional, and
resolute - and it perfectly captures the essence of Rat Saw God.
Wednesday's unique blend of shoegaze, country, and indie rock provides a
great display of the melodic, emotional, and raw . "What's So Funny" and
"Formula One" showcase the somber and mellow side of Rat Saw God. The former
strips away the layers of instrumentation, leaving the soundscape a barren
wasteland with nothing more than haunting guitar passages, quiet drum work,
and nearly whispered, subtle vocals. The latter of the two has a bit more of
an uplifting approach, with its smooth groove accentuated by airy,
country-twinged leads and a beautiful contrast of male/female vocals. On the
other hand, "Hot Rotten Grass Smell" and the build-up of "Turkey Vultures"
demonstrate the noisy elements of Wednesday's style. The opener wastes no
time, jumping straight into gritty guitar chords filled with feedback and
distortion that introduces Rat Saw God in an ambitious manner. Likewise, the
release of tension in "Turkey Vultures" adds to the noisy atmosphere of the
record with grainy leads, energetic drum chops, and shouts that gain
intensity as the song progresses.
However, where Wednesday truly excels is in combining these two juxtaposed
aspects. Their ability to seamlessly transition between mellow melody and
intense grit is what defines Rat Saw God. The quiet verses of "Quarry" with
their solemn reflections are contrasted with the eruption of distorted
choruses where every instrument adds a new level of intensity that exudes
power and emotion. In a darker tone, "Bath County" is filled with eerie
verses that give way to soaring and driving choruses laden with wavering
shouts and grainy guitars full of ferocity. What perfectly encapsulates this
dynamic is the aforementioned "Bull Believer," with its beautiful
juxtaposition between the agonizing part one of the "Bull" and the cathartic
release of the climatic "Believer."
Alongside the powerful instrumentation, the album's subtly impactful lyricism
provides an additional layer of Rat Saw God's beauty. Throughout the record,
Wednesday wears their heart on their sleeves, emotionally opening up for
anyone to relate to. The lyrical passages of "Chosen to Deserve" describe the
defining moments of adolescence to a lover in such a dry way that it's a
simple reflection of what defined their early years and what to expect of the
girl who used to sneak out and drink herself sick. "Quarry," with its
detailed descriptions of the lives and mannerisms of civilians, invites
listeners to step into a fictional neighborhood with its problems and
redemptions. Simple imagery, though sporadically found throughout, adds extra
depth to the powerful surface-narrative by giving a focal point to latch on
to, like the bull of "Bull Believer" or the analogous "I ran like hell into
the burning house" from "Got Shocked." Although not necessarily taking risks
in crafting complex or ambiguous lyrical narratives, Rat Saw God is rich in
matter-of-fact, emotional lyrics that perfectly fit Wednesday's style.
With such an abrasive approach of mellow and noisy instrumentation and
upfront and personal lyricism, Rat Saw God could be described as an album
characterized by "flaws" - but that's exactly what defines the record.
Without polish or overproduction, Wednesday sound is a powerful exclamation
of a narrative, full of noise, beauty, and deeply relatable feelings and
stories. It may not feel perfect, but it's real.
*
Wednesday's noisy, rangy sound finds a home in the quiet, lonely corners of
America. Their outstanding new album is why they're one of the best indie
rock bands around.
When Karly Hartzman tells you "there's a place where the kids go to kiss,"
it's just one stop on a long, weird tour. The line arrives in the closing
verse of a song called "Handsome Man" from Wednesday's 2021 album Twin
Plagues, right after she points out how the wallpaper in the bathroom seems
to "wince" while you piss. You get the sense she's mentioning this place less
as a starry-eyed invitation than for the sake of being comprehensive: It's
another spot to revisit, and plenty of people have written songs about it.
There's much more to see.
Wednesday's Curdled Beauty
How about, for example, the Planet Fitness where someone died in the parking
lot? Or the fridge with the crickets behind it? Have you seen the sex shop
with the biblical name? Or how about the house that turned out to be a mob
front? You will find all these hidden, unloved locales scattered through Rat
Saw God, Wednesday's lightning bolt of a fifth album. So much writing about
the quiet, lonely corners of America spends its time longing to break free,
aching for something big to happen. Hartzman's characters have no great plans
and nowhere to go, so they wind up luxuriating in the quiet and the
loneliness as Hartzman traffics in the casual poetry of people who share
enough in common to skip the pleasantries. "We always started by telling our
best stories first," she sings. "So now that it's been a while I'll get to
tellin' you all my worst."
The same way Hartzman can guide you through a landscape that subtly grows as
familiar as the one where you grew up, she sometimes gives the sense that
you're poring through her books and record collection, sitting beside her as
she recites the underlined passages. In her lyrics, there are quotes from
fiction writers George Saunders and Richard Brautigan; shout-outs to Bill
Callahan and Drive-By Truckers. These are lofty comparisons, but Wednesday
have the ambition to make these masters feel not only like peers but also
like neighbors in their mythological hometown.
As Hartzman's lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her
bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances. Listen
casually and you will hear a killer rock band raised on alternative landmarks
from the '90s and early '00s; listen closer and the woozy, grainy
performances speak a language all their own. Some songs play like nonstop
crescendos, starting at a steady rumble and only gaining speed, like the
eight-minute "Bull Believer." Others take you on a journey from twinkly
ambience to reckless, pile-driving rock, as in the awestruck "Turkey
Vultures." This dynamic sound, propelled by the gnarly interplay of guitarist
MJ Lenderman and pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, allows Hartzman's details
to reveal themselves in surprising ways over the course of a single track:
buried in cozy blankets of indie-rock fuzz, peering through rusty layers of
noise-rock sheet metal, or burbling atop grinding alt-country that sputters
like a stalled motor.
Even at their most crowd-pleasing, these modes always complement the stark
realism and gothic humor in Hartzman's words. "Chosen to Deserve" is, in
theory, a love song. Centered on an undeniable Southern rock riff that would
sound at home on FM radio between, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger,
Hartzman winds through verses that pledge her devotion through a series of
confessions about her messier, scrappier teen years: an ode to reaching the
giddy point in a relationship when it's impossible to overshare. "If you're
lookin' for me/I'm in the back of an SUV," she sings, "Doin' it in some
cul-de-sac/Underneath a dogwood tree."
The real way Hartzman shows her love, however, is by refusing to cover up the
ugly parts. In the second verse, she sings about a friend who nearly
overdosed and the doctor who told him he was "lucky to survive." But listen
to the way she sings that last word, her voice dipping and cracking and
falling out of key. Filtered through the perspective of a kid who doesn't see
life as some rare gift to cherish, she makes "survival" sound a little
pathetic, kinda humiliating-not something to celebrate, just another slog to
get through.
If this seems like challenging material-and indeed, Wednesday are likely the
first rock band to rhyme "sedan" with "Narcan"-then the approachable,
communal feel of Rat Saw God is a breakthrough. The music seems designed to
draw people in, aided in part by producer Alex Farrar, who's worked on
similarly commanding records from Indigo De Souza, Angel Olsen, and Snail
Mail. These introspective outsider anthems could very well be the songs that
bring Wednesday to their biggest stages, and they navigate this transition
with newfound melodic pull-it only takes five seconds before "Quarry" lodges
in your head-and increased confidence as storytellers. Like the characters
she sings about, Hartzman might seem at first like she's rambling, narrating
the view as she circles the block, before you realize she's actually baring
her soul.
So much of this magic can be heard in her delivery of the words "finish him"
at the end of "Bull Believer." First, there's the lyrical context: She's at a
New Year's party; she has a nosebleed; someone is on the couch playing Mortal
Kombat. Then there's the way she sings it as her band thrashes and swells:
first a murmur, then a wail, then a cry, then a shredded, unintelligible
shriek. It goes on for a long time, and it's difficult to imagine her
replicating it every night on tour. Hartzman has explained in interviews she
didn't rehearse this moment, and she considered driving to the middle of
nowhere to try it out, alone, in a wide open space. Still, the recorded
version-a first take in the studio while her bandmates were downstairs
playing video games-is the one. By now she's learned there's plenty of escape
to be found in the wild, uncharted country within.
*
Wednesday sing ragged tributes to delinquency, paeans to bad choices made
with only mild later regret. Frontwoman and songwriter Karly Hartzman
commandingly presides over a sinewy collection of ten songs, her voice
running the gamut from a whisper to a scream.
The Asheville, North Carolina outfit is having its well-deserved moment
spurred by this new release, its third full-length (plus last year's
excellent album of covers that included a rendition of Drive By Truckers'
'Women Without Whiskey' better than their heroes' original.) This band is
generating a lot of buzz in what has been (to my ears anyway) a quiet year so
far.
If we are slapping labels on its music, Wednesday plays country rock, a
distinctly American idiom that usually sets my teeth on edge, often being the
sonic equivalent of a pissing Calvin sans Hobbes sticker on a performatively
muddy Dodge Ram truck. If you are reading this in the U.K., you might not
know what I'm talking about. Consider yourself lucky.
Wednesday filters this genre through its own grungy sensibilities. Yeah,
there is lap steel, expertly played, the instrument that cries "country," but
it has been slumming with its city cousins. The siren guitar on 'Bull
Believer' is straight out of the Pixies' 'Dead.' (More on that song in a
bit.) The lap steel is part of a three guitar onslaught including Ms.
Hartzman's rhythm and her boyfriend Jake Lenderman's lead that can make an
unholy but tuneful racket. (Jake Lenderman records separately under the
moniker MJ Lenderman and his 2022 album Boat Songs is a gem. This band has
loads of talent.)
The wonderfully titled 'Hot Rotten Grass Smell' opens the album with a blast
of sound that is over too soon in one and a half minutes. This is followed by
the epic 'Bull Believer,' over 8 minutes long, that ends with two minutes of
Hartzman completely losing her shit at a New Year's party as her nose bleeds
and her boyfriend is preoccupied with Mortal Kombat. Don't play this one at
your hoedown unless you want your ginghamed guests seeking shelter or the
exits. It is a phenomenal song that is closer to Mannequin Pussy in both its
quiet and unhinged moments than any country act I can think of. (Let's make a
Mannequin Pussy/Wednesday double bill happen, please.)
Hartzman writes with honesty, authenticity, and an ear for a tune. 'Chosen to
Deserve' should be, if there were any justice, a crossover top 40 hit,
blasting at every Nashville bachelorette party. The confessional lyrics
however, might not be radio friendly what with the drug overdoses, habitual
drunken hooky, outdoor urination and "If you're lookin' for me I'm in the
back of an SUV/Doin' it in some cul-de-sac underneath a dogwood tree.' This
song is a come-clean for her bandmate and romantic interest Lenderman, but it
works, too, as an apologia with no apologies (you not only deserve this, you
were chosen for it) directed to her parents, an alternative reading the
song's sweet video supports. The teenage years might not have been easy, Mr.
and Mrs. Hartzman, but you did good.
It is going to be difficult for any album this year to match the three- song
stretch that anchors the middle of the album-'Chosen to Deserve,' 'Bath
County' and 'Quarry'-each one with a rousing sing-alongable chorus and vivid
stories of Dollywood, Narcan doses administered in parking lots, lice-haired
kids in baby pools, newspaper wrapped cocaine in the drywall. Flannery
O'Connor you can dance to or at least tap your foot on the bar rail. Hartzman
has a "there-but-for-the-grace-of-god" empathy for her subjects. She deftly
dodges caricature and pathos. It's just life; it's grubby and ugly but goofy
as hell and she's surviving it, too.
When not spilling her guts or spinning tales, Hartzmann is a keen observer of
herself and her boyfriend, bandmates, and surroundings. She is quite good at
evoking an image or feeling with a spare lyric as in the tender, but
ambivalent love song 'Formula One' ('I like sleepin' with the lights on/You
next to me watching Formula One') and the edgy, feedback -tinged road song
that closes the album, 'TV in the Gas Pump' ('Swingset in a big fuckin'
field').
It's cause for celebration when a young band comes into its own. Wednesday is
the real deal musically and lyrically and is hitting a confident stride. I
would follow them to where they are going.
*
Bands shouldn't be judged by their influences. That said, when Wednesday
stepped into the arena of indie rock prestige following a promising debut LP
with a covers album that named checked cult artists (Medicine, Chris Bell),
Southern local heroes (Vic Chestnutt, Drive-by Truckers), and sensitive
alt-rockers alike (Smashing Pumpkins), they gleefully expressed their
reverence like the precocious musicians they are. Instead, they were on to
something bigger: The Asheville, North Carolina five-piece was teasing what
essentially became the sonic makeup of their multifaceted second effort, Raw
Saw God.
Obvious references aside, Wednesday intends to capture everyday minutiae
through the barren landscapes of rural America. On the one hand, their
dreary, pedal steel-led ballads (Formula One) and intricate folk-rock (What's
So Funny) stand on similar ground to contemporaries like Big Thief and Why
Bonnie. On the other hand, their sweet-sounding yet vigorous guitar dynamics
tap into '90s college rock with sharp mastery of the material (Got Shocked,
Hot Rotten Grass Smell). The centerpiece here, the eight 1/2-minute Bull
Believer, approaches tuneful dissonance steeped in sludgy reverb, building
into a rousing finale centered around grief that cleverly interlocks theology
and the video game Mortal Kombat with an exasperating cry: "Finish him."
And then there's the songwriter responsible for that blistering performance,
Karly Hartzman, whose indelible tales of people living on the fringes of
society resonate with a kind of ashy poetry. Compared to her bandmate MJ
Lenderman, whose homespun debut wasn't as fully-formed, she propels an
afflicted vocal delivery that offsets his ruminative alienation. Not
everything works on Raw Saw God. The rootsy, Southern-fried Chosen to Believe
sounds more Hootie than Doobie, though its meditation on love and acceptance
saves its pop-leaning misdirection. It's a testament to Hartzman's nuanced
lyrical bent, whose articulate observations are intriguing and even funny
rather than affected.
*
The third album from North Carolina's Wednesday comes at a time when their
stock hasn't been higher - hype bubbling over across the board; an extensive
four-month tour across the US, UK and EU eagerly awaiting them. 'Rat Saw God'
sees the band hone their seductive powers for grunge pop and country rock
more acutely than ever. The heavy hitters here are coruscatingly direct.
Brief-but-blistering opener 'Hot Rotten Grass Smell' explodes its
steaming-hot noise like a jet-engine to the face. Eight-minute-plus
centrepiece 'Bull Believer' winds and crawls before vocalist Karly Hartzman
screams her lungs out - "Finish him! Finish him!" - for the song's uproarious
conclusion. Then, offsetting these come lounging country crooners 'Chosen to
Deserve' or 'Quarry', each loaded with that Big Thief-ian edge of uncertain
ground underfoot. Most distinctive however in Wednesday's well-stocked
armoury are those ever more diaristic lyrical narratives pushing the most
benign of observations into the emotionally-charged contexts and vice versa:
passing out on a couch with a nosebleed while your friend plays Mortal
Kombat; someone who took so much ecstasy that he had to get his stomach
pumped. While some of the stylistic variation here can feel disjointed at
times, there's plenty on offer to suggest a band on the rise, capable of
rising even higher.
*
"Chosen To Deserve", a knotty relationship anthem on Wednesday's third album,
features one of the more unusual ODs described in a rock song. "My friends
all took Benadryl 'til they could see shit crawlin' up the walls",
guitarist/vocalist Karly Hartzman sings, her voice twisting into a slurred
twang. "One of those times my friend took a little too much/He had to get his
stomach pumped".
It's a complicated moment, funny but also harrowing, and she sounds
simultaneously embarrassed by her juvenile escapades, impressed by their
wildness, and relieved that she and her friends survived long enough to put
the memory into a song. A sharp lyricist with a keen eye for revealing
details, and a surprisingly deft singer with the ability to add fine
gradients of emotion to a throwaway line, Hartzman stands by all her dumb
decisions, all her glaring flaws, all her bad experiences: "I'm the girl you
were chosen to deserve", she declares, then adds: "Thank God that I was
chosen to deserve you".
The song is an apt introduction to this Asheville, North Carolina band,
who've already released two studio albums and a covers collection in their
few years together. All of Wednesday's influences and concerns, along with
all their vices and virtues, are rammed into the rambunctious five-and-a-half
minutes of "Chosen To Deserve": a massive Southern-rock riff from MJ
Lenderman, a scribbly Sonic Youth/Crazy Horse guitar attack, smears of cosmic
lap steel from Xandy Chelmis. Their love of '90s alt.rock has already
prompted comparisons to acts like Snail Mail and Phoebe Bridgers, but
Wednesday cast a wider net: at times on Rat Saw God, they sound like a skewed
country band several whiskey neats into a set, at other times they're
snarling skatepunks hellbent on making trouble.
The quintet laid out their influences on last year's wide-ranging Mowing The
Leaves Instead Of Piling 'Em Up, which is more essential and revealing than
most covers albums. They studied the honky-tonk storytelling of Gary Stewart,
the psychedelic melodicism of Smashing Pumpkins, and the Southern
eccentricity of Vic Chesnutt, but perhaps no other band exerts more of an
influence than the Drive-By Truckers. Wednesday toured with them last year,
covered "Women Without Whiskey", even added a shout-out on their new song
"Bath County". Most crucially they share with that band a similar sense of
place and a penchant for open-ended songwriting. "They're doing what I wanna
do when I'm older," Hartzman tells Uncut.
On Rat Saw God, Wednesday take those lessons and work them into their own
songs. Like her heroes, Hartzman understands that she's her best source of
materials - not just her emotions and ideas, but her background, where she
grew up and the people she grew up with. Instead, this is an album full of
everyday tragedies: overdoses, police raids, car crashes, ungrounded amps,
unwanted pregnancies, head lice, nosebleeds, and a relentless loneliness that
floods you even when you're among friends, bandmates or lovers.
On "Quarry", she gives listeners a tour of her old neighbourhood, depicting
its hard-luck denizens with sympathy and specificity: there's the old woman
at the end of the block who complains about spoiled children "but then she
gives out full-size candy bars on Halloween". And the Kletz brothers, with
head lice and "flat parts on their crew cuts from layin' their heads on their
knees". Those poetic details accumulate into poignant images of home, but
Hartzman make no stabs at romanticising this milieu.
That's because her bandmates won't let her. They add dramatic punch to these
songs, enough to remind you Wednesday is a band and not a singer-songwriter
project. They're sympathetic to her travails, but never so much that it gets
in the way of the runaway tempo of "TV In The Gas Pump" or akimbo riffs of
"Hot Rotten Grass Smell" or the trippy tempo changes on "Turkey Vultures".
They might be the friends she keeps singing about, the ones doing Benadryl
and playing Mortal Kombat all night, especially when they blast "Bull
Believer" wide open, wailing discordantly while Hartzman screams, "Finish
him! Finish him!" Once they hit that dramatic pique, they keep going,
maintaining the din for nearly two minutes. Rarely does so much noise convey
such raw melancholy.
Remarkably, the world they create together never curdles into sentimentality.
As much as these songs dwell on their past, they make no room for nostalgia.
"Memory always twists the knife", Kartzman sings on "What's So Funny", mixing
humour and horror until they're indistinguishable. "Nothing will ever be as
vivid as the darkest time of my life". Wednesday turn that stabbing pain into
triumphant rock'n'roll.
-=- 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.
---==--==---