SAVE THE DATE! IT’S TIME FOR WEDNESDAY’S ELECTRIFYING OUTLAW SHOEGAZE
“HAVE YOU ever gotten electrocuted?” asks Wednesday’s frontwoman Karly Hartzman politely. “It’s a crazy feeling. There’s no way not to write a song about it.”
Describe the North Carolina band as “electrifying”, and it isn’t entirely metaphorical: Got Shocked, a track on their fifth album, Rat
Saw God, outlines the consequences of living and playing in a converted garage where the landlord’s DIY skills have fallen dangerously short. “First I felt the thunder then I blacked out at band practice,” Hartzman sings, “I’m told that I screamed and looked up/Then I sat down and wept after the amp got unplugged.”
Charged up by grunge and outlaw country, Wednesday’s music transmits a torrent of vivid images down its crackling, buzzing wires. “Like flashbulbs,” says Hartzman, who was studying photography at the University Of North Carolina Asheville when she met her bandmates: guitarist (and partner) Jake ‘MJ’ Lenderman; drummer Alan Miller; lap steel player Xandy Chelmis and bassist Margo Schultz (who plays on Rat Saw God but has since left the band).
The retina-burning scenarios on Rat Saw
God, follow-up to 2021’s Twin Plagues, are often channelled from Hartzman’s upbringing in Greensboro, where her first involvement in music came through synagogue. “Once they figure out that you have a singing voice, they rope you into the choir,” she explains, speaking from a tourbus heading through the desert towards the band’s Albuquerque show. A more secular universe soon opened up: a CD of The Sundays’ Reading, Writing And
Arithmetic; a tape made for her by a middleschool friend who had discovered My Bloody
“My main goal was to make shoegaze with lyrics that are worth listening to.” KARLY HARTZMAN
Valentine and Cocteau Twins; hearing DriveBy Truckers as a corrective to the country radio in the air around her. While she loved shoegazing, as somebody who wrote poetry, she wanted something more concrete than a nebulous feeling. “My main goal when I started was to make shoegaze with lyrics that are discernible, that are worth listening to.”
Accordingly, “Heard someone died in the Planet Fitness parking lot” is not a line you could imagine coming from Elizabeth Fraser’s mouth. Elsewhere, there are kids sitting in “a baby pool with lice in their hair”, a truck with its roof ripped off under a low bridge, or, on Chosen To Deserve, a song about the moment in a relationship when your past falls open and there’s nothing left to hide, sex in an SUV “in some cul-de-sac/Underneath a dogwood tree.”
Despite the careful attention to lyrics and lyricists – opening sensory hit Hot Rotten Grass Smell includes a homage to Bill Callahan’s 2005 song The Well (“Fuck all y’all down the wishing well”) – the unholy howl that closes Bull Believer makes it clear Wednesday are a band of primal ’90s alt-rock energy too, the chainsaws and yellow jackets namechecked in What’s So Funny another useful approximation of their sound. Yet as with electrocution, says the singer, not everything is a metaphor.
“When things get too abstract, it’s just creating a distance,” says Hartzman. “I want to put people right in the situation I’m describing.”