Rating: 3.5/5 stars
The indie world has an inconsistent relationship with country. The trademark hipster rejects country pop as a successful bourgeois attempt at convincing rural farmers that they can find representation in a rhinestone cowboy; they also listen to Wednesday (“Twin Plagues”). But Wednesday is much more Southern than the CMAs and it has nothing to do with being from the hills of North Carolina. Under the hazy waves of pedals and reverb lie a country twang and anti-city slicker lyrics about Formula One and Dollar General.
Their fifth album “Rat Saw God,” released on April 7, takes shoegaze and calls it bootgaze. The album takes you on a journey through the isolation of flyover country with the vivid imagination of vocalist Karly Hartzman. She is quite the storyteller who can evoke Americana scenery without sounding like the country genre label forces her to. She is not trying to condition you to identify with trips to strip malls and Dollywood; it is the same rawness that lets a Liz Phair (“Exile in Guyville”) type of tomboyness suddenly turn into the more emo side of boygenius (“the record”).
The album kicks off with the short intro “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” a compact sample of Wednesday’s unique sound. Hartzman relays images of everyday life that together form the image that suggests her own death. Wednesday’s brand of Southern Gothic takes the cautionary journey of Ethel Cain (“Preacher’s Daughter”) and conjures her horror in their seemingly innocuous hometown.
Lead single “Bull Believer” continues the morbid imagery, from being a ghost to being a bullfighter. Wednesday takes the Pixies’ (“Doolittle”) standard of dynamic changes to represent the unpredictability of coming to terms with trauma. Hartzman sees her friends’ graves rising from the ground; blasts of guitar strums transport her to her couch with her partner playing Mortal Kombat. She repeats a refrain of “finish him” with the angsty hollers of Black Country, New Road (“Ants From Up There”) until everything boiling inside of her finally lets out into a swell of fuzz and shrieks.
Wednesday reveals more about the antics of the crackpot neighborhood of “Rat Saw God” on “Quarry.” The song describes a community of crabby Boomers, teen pregnancy and the redneck mafia. This does not embarrass Hartzman though; she sings on the chorus, “We had to add it to the tab/To die we’d have to settle up.” Wednesday does not judge the backwoods as backwards. These are just the inescapable scandals we all love to rubberneck on in rural towns.
Wednesday’s bootgaze sound combines the noise with the twangy, but the band is still able to keep their pacing interesting. “Formula One” is a slower track relishing in the peace of this isolated world. Hartzman sings about random images melding into a feeling of malaise and frustration. She sees a race car accident on live TV, a rusty can opener “neglected” in a drawer and a bird flying into the same window every day. She quotes a poem from Richard Brautigan: “Love’s not the way to treat a friend.” It is a story of isolation, but isolation with another.
The new Wednesday album encapsulates the experience of a rat seeing God: the enormity of something larger exposes its mystery to a single vermin that feels overwhelmed enough. Hartzman’s eclectic but heartwarming lyrics make their fusion of wistful country and lush shoegaze quirkier than it already is.
Image from Wednesday via Bandcamp
