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Wednesday Takes an Intimate Snapshot of the South on Rat Saw God

The Asheville-based quintet’s latest album blends blue-grass and shoegaze to create a set of visceral vignettes.

By Samantha Sullivan  |  April 7, 2023 | 11:06am
Photo by Zachary Chick
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There’s something about the South that’s sort of impossible to explain. It has this je ne sais quoi that hovers like the sticky humidity-you can’t pinpoint it, but you can feel it in the air. It comes in flashes, the machine guns, crushed Four Loko cans, stock car races, Bible verse bumper stickers and awkward glances around the classroom when you get abstinence-only sex education, feel like heat lightning. It’s sacrilegious and sacred, it’s pregaming in a church parking lot before heading to the high-school football game. Wednesday, get it. They lived it. On their latest album, Rat Saw God, out today via Dead Oceans, they capture the off-kilter magic of one of the most confusing places.

Written in the weeks following their 2021 break-out, Twin Plagues, Karly Hartzman (guitar/vocals), MJ Lenderman (guitar), Margo Schulz (bass), Alan Miller (drums) and Xandy Chelmis (lap steel) continue to create a chaotic haze spliced by recollections of fervent specifics. They combine spellbinding shoegaze with their blue-grass roots, leaving you wondering if they’re staring down at a pair of well-worn Converse or cowboy boots while they play. Despite the odds, they make steel pedals and dense Slowdive-esque riffs make sense.

They say you can’t choose where you’re from, but you can choose where you go and in a way, that’s exactly what Wednesday does. It’s like driving a second-hand pick-up truck while blasting Swirlies-you’re charting your own course, but there are some things you can’t shake. However, Wednesday is fearless in the face of collisions. Even on “Chosen To Deserve,” a should-be straightforward love song, Hartzman takes a detour to talk about hooking up at the end of a cul de sac and a friend that took so much Benadryl they had to get their stomach pumped. They frequently overlap the gritty and the gorgeous like in “Bath County” when religious references are followed up by someone getting hit with a dose of Narcan in a two-door sedan.

This lyrical precision is what makes the record shine, the fact that Hartzman can recall the exact video game, in this case, Mortal Kombat, that someone was playing when her nose started bleeding at a New Year’s Eve party she didn’t even want to be at. There’s something striking in how sentimental the details feel, how she can weave these intimate narratives out of “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta,” and a Planet Fitness parking lot that makes their country-gaze so alluring. It feels like sitting on your front-porch stoop with a bunch of old friends playing a scatter-brained game of “remember when?”

It’s these niche instances that make Rat Saw God feel like a piece of collection consciousness instead of personal mythology. You can’t help but see a little bit of yourself in their vignettes. For some reason, the kid that burned down a cornfield and the girl whose house was “a front for a mob thing” on “Quarry” feel like people you’ve met before, figments of small-town folklore that make you nod your head and say “yeah I think I’ve heard that story before.” It’s all in Hartmzan’s earnest delivery, how her vocals seem to beg you not to forget what happened even if it didn’t make headlines.

While this imagery carries an innate sense of emotion, there are moments on the album where Hartzman’s one-liners serve as a knock-out punch. Over sedated chords on “What’s so Funny,” she trapezes from talking about running a chainsaw until it ran out of gas to lamenting, “Nothing will ever be as vivid as the darkest time in my life.” These confessions come out of the blue, undecorated and direct, the way things in life sometimes do, leaving you with no pretty metaphors or double meanings to use for damage control. These confrontations happen sonically as well, like in their eight-minute epic “Bull Believer,” when following Hartzman’s shrill command to “Finish him,” a deluge of wailing guitars and apocalyptic percussion make it clear that there’s no changing fate. It’s a swift delivery that feels more like an execution, another instance where Wednesday is forced to face things head on-and they never flinch.

Whether they express it through private symbolism or get straight to the point, it doesn’t matter. Wednesday is the woman who thinks “America” is “a spoiled little child” but still gives out king-sized candy bars on Halloween. They’re the kids with crew cuts and the rest stop on the way to Dollywood. They’re the exhilaration of sneaking into the neighborhood pool and only going to school three days a week. They’re everything they document on Rat Saw God and more.

 
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