by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
Last year, Wednesday finally made it to San Diego's Soda Bar. By then it seemed a hectic and bizarre moment. They were headlining their own set of California dates away from opening for Beach Bunny. Dates shortly after a blink of a break where members of the band had been recovering from the triple threat of COVID, SXSW, and openly presenting their touring logistics for going to SXSW; that latter one somehow kicked a hornets nest that snowballed into wider discourse that no one was really having fun arguing over and quite frankly, only further demonstrated the lack of empathy and understanding people have about the state of what it means to make and present music to an audience.
That night, they were an entire continent away from where they were from, here in a distant land having just seen the Pacific Ocean. Everyone was a little existential in that moment, the kind where banter between crack-pot funnyman and guitarist MJ Lenderman and frontwoman Karly Hartzman sidesteps, not defuses, the underlying tension. So, of course they played an absolutely devastating new cut called “Bull Believer” that clearly was meant to weed out those demons and any bullshit in the room. If anything mattered in that moment, it was this electric energy conveyed as players.
The five-piece will probably never play a venue like the Soda Bar again with regularity. Even as their drummer, Alan Miller, and pedal steel player, Xandy Chelmis, were slinging their recent (and brilliant) covers cassette while decked out in Orindal Records shirts at the merch table, it was blatantly obvious that the five-piece (having started as Hartzmann's solo project and had warped line-ups several times over) were too big for a Chicago tape label who's roster put them next to Tara Jane O'Neil and Macie Stewart. They stuck out there because no one was drawing a thought line between crackgaze pioneers Medicine, Greg Sage's crushing songwriting finesse, and the lived-in immediacy of Drive-By Truckers. Wednesday had proven swiftly that they had recontextualized a mode of southern "bar rock". One that seemed tailored to twentysomethings that were also in their bedrooms, but weren't interested in songs about say... riding the bus or using shoegaze to create romantic maximalism to cleanse in. Wednesday songs were confrontational and hit like cars being crushed in a scrapyard. No surprise that their last album cover Twin Plagues borderline functioned akin to a callback to Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade. To lament them leaving the hole in the wall of a bar for something larger was to miss the urgency and necessity of this sound; it demanded a larger stage.
With their Dead Oceans debut Rat Saw God, Hartzman, Chelmis, Miller, Lenderman, and Margo Schultz (who departed after completion) present a refined status quo for what Wednesday represents. The one intro and nine tracks are an immense bunch racing between downright fried indie rock and introspective confessional scream-outs that keep pushing the honky tonk up. If Wednesday wants to bullshit their way into a slot at Stagecoach with this album, they theoretically could. Without a doubt, this is the most refined the gang have ever sounded, spinning between these two lanes with immense ease. Neither side is a duality though; the ample amount of Chelmis' pedal steel that shines through, or the times Hartzman and Lenderman duo, even just the raw lockstep the five musicians find themselves in. Something larger than the sum of the parts collides into these brilliant explosions of everyday situations.
It's nine times the same song, but the formula is crookt crackt n' fly. "Countrygaze" is a label that has been thrown around Wednesday. An intermingling of American Country instrumentation and swagger by ways of fried indie. Their 2022 covers tape is the most handy framework and reading list that summarizes how they've ended up here. Yet more largely, Wednesday is in conversation about what country aesthetics mean right now for a specific generation of listener. It's in line with a conversation William Tyler is having with cosmic pastoralism or Powers/Rolin duo continue to tinker with in their longforms and Astral Editions curation. Those are realms which lie for a different kind of country that is instrumental, that often lets the listener fill in the blank. Wednesday's sound is anything but that and aspires for a different kind of entryway into that beauty.
Hartzman practically came with a textbook of faces and places, amongst humongous sound. The people, mostly kids, who dared to dream of something else to do, are between an absolute awe-inspiring region perpetually misunderstood. Hartzman is a legitimately potent lyricist that, for my money, is building off of two wildly different individuals. The first, bar rock bad boy Steve Albini, who with Big Black married asshole guitar noise to bleak assholes in no-nothing towns that aspired to self-immolate. The second, American-hauntologist Bradford Cox, who used Deerhunter's early 2010s era to recast the south, but obsessed over the spaces of lost futures, the syntax, and the potential for a queer redemption. Last year, Chat Pile broadly attempted to build off those two formulas, for a pulp nightmare of its own accord of what it means to live in Oklahoma; there was no room for the grace though, no truths or redemption to be found.
Hartzman carries that fire of understanding where you are from that Albini and Cox did, but she’s casually infused into an almost-socio realism; one that lives on its journal-laden details. She looks at the spaces of intermingling: ample parking lots, woodlands near housing, bedrooms, blue sky highways. She does not so much as warp them, but often marries them to detail that just let the contradictions of the south present. There’s no immolation on them or fake-out redemption, just lived-in beauty though. These are people that drink piss-colored Fanta in a parking lot, overdose on benadryl and have their stomach pumped, or screwing in a cul-de-sac; also being stung by yellowjackets. There’s a deft of marrying some of these stories to mellow cuts. Different fates and situations track with the album’s ample dives into slower territory that scales back fuzz.
When the noise hits, Hartzman really parallels and reveals a deep resonance for telling it as it is. Hartzman has the kind of voice that automatically felt distinctive; part slowcore longing mended with southern drawl. It enunciates the quirks and peculiarities of it all akin to a red wheelbarrow full of water about to tip over; introspection taken towards, and perhaps in one case a breaking point. “Bath Country” drowns Hartzman in distortion, a corroboration of accepting to live for that moment because it has no clue what could come next. Everything about the band’s presentation of their instrumentation, tied to lyrics, are evocative of a region and knowing anything goes. It has come as no surprise that many blogs have overwhelmingly praised and contended their own experience there.
Yet, these are spaces that are not exactly unique to the south. Anyone from Little Rock, CA could listen to this album and probably find it hits on a truth of life in spaces away from the commerce and industrial zones. Instead of traveling towards the Pacific Ocean that day they arrived in San Diego, had Wednesday instead taken a day trip to San Diego's fabled East County they would have seen a pocket dimension of exactly what is being tapped into on Rat Saw God. Showing up hungover to teach Sunday School is perhaps a universal experience. The lack of overarching opportunity, and how that trickles into fucked-up relationships and routines, is immensely apparent on this album. The fact that Hartzman refuses to pass judgment on these people and situations offers a salvation of its own accord.
Therein lies what makes the sub-40 minutes of Rat Saw God such a distinctive reward. It just feels like a populist record. There’s a flair articulated by the cryptid on the cover of the “Bull Believer” single; one that channels the silent prayer Dennis Dinion was photographed performing and immortalized on the cover of Halcyon Digest or the snake river dream cover of Reckoning. There is no reconstruction of the southern fables, nor are they fables really on this album. Just a new spin on noise, again articulating the south on its own terms.