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Delicate, alt-country licks are curtailed by noisy blasts of electric feedback, while frontwoman Karly Hartzman candidly recounts memories that sit between angst and sentimentality. Now several albums in, this formula is deeply entrenched, but Bleeds has put Rat Saw God in second place for one thing: The genre disparity between raucous shoegaze and poignant country is no longer too distant.
Rarely would Wednesday traverse both modes on the same song, opting for either zero or a hundred on each. While this wouldn’t deter cohesion, the fake-outs between the harmonious and dissonant could be better tempered for stronger songs, individually unfurlling as vibrant, patchworky tapestries of surging emotion. Bleeds triumphantly accomplishes this: It’s undoubtedly Wednesday’s strongest of songs, the stories astonishingly vivid, and the Southern rock flavour more potent than ever. Hartzman is right when she calls Bleeds the “spiritual successor to Rat Saw God,” as her existential musings play out like films because of how engaged the band sounds.
“Reality TV Argument Bleeds” is similar to Rat Saw God’s
introduction in that its blazing riffs are an exciting gut-punch,
immediately bruising. “Townies” is doused with pleasant lap steel, but
the band turn up the distortion to intensify Hartzman’s crushing
passages: “You sent my nudes around / I never yelled at you about it
cause you died.” “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” is discomfiting from the
onset, Hartzman opening with recalling finding a body “drowned in the
creek.” Such a line epitomises the dark and disturbing smalltown truths
typical of grit lit, but the band lived those moments – the whirring,
disjointed chords convey this reality. “Phish Pepsi” is a light-hearted
palette cleanser, its spry Americana-style fingerplucking a sudden pause
from the unsettling tales and screeching guitars. Closer “Gary’s II” is
an intimate ditty, a sequel to the interlude from 2021’s Twin Plagues asserting the throughline that Wednesday’s songs cover real people, and meaning can be derived from the lives of others.
The crowning achievement is “Pick Up That Knife”, where its plausible, carefree anecdotes ground Hartzman’s words in our world, like you could tell your friends a similar tale: “Threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show / In a bottle spit dip and tell dirty jokes.” Her most passionate vocal is when she repeats “They’ll meet you outside,” aiming for a note just out of reach, to almost manifest that – the concurrent conclusive hair-raising coda evocative of J Mascis’ saturated melodic tone further shows the group bleeding with intent.
Wednesday know what they want to say, and how: Pouring their hearts out with reckless riffage to illustrate the agony and ecstasy of smalltown life. If Bleeds’ stories are already so great, just imagine how affecting another treasury of Hartzman’s ruminations would be with the band this revitalised. Moving forward, they’re only going to be more vital.
English (US) · 