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.
Photo by Zachary Chick
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.