Mistletone

WEDNESDAY TOUR DATES:

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 25: MONA FOMA, HOBART. Tickets/info here.
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 27: PERTH FESTIVAL with MJ LENDERMAN. Tickets on sale here.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 29: SYDNEY @ THE FACTORY THEATRE with MJ LENDERMAN. Tickets on sale here.
SATURDAY MARCH 2: SEASONAL FRUIT, BRISBANE @ FELONS BARREL HALL. Tickets on sale here.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 6: BRUNSWICK MUSIC FESTIVAL @ Estonian House with special guests Delivery. Tickets on sale now.
FRIDAY MARCH 8: THEATRE ROYAL CASTLEMAINE with special guests MJ Lenderman +Parsnip. Tickets on sale now.
SATURDAY MARCH 9: GOLDEN PLAINS FESTIVAL, Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre. 

Wednesday is a band from North Carolina led by Karly Hartzman (guitar/vocals), with MJ Lenderman (guitar), Xandy Chelmis (lap/pedal steel), Ethan Baechtold (bass) and Alan Miller (drums). Hartzman writes most of her songs from her bedroom floor in Asheville, North Carolina.

Nodding to ‘90s skuzz, shoegaze, and country, the music is gauzy and heady, a gnarled wall of sound where Hartzman’s aching voice and vivid storytelling cut through the din. Hartzman is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller; the newest and best Wednesday record, Rat Saw God, is autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic.

The band has long revered country lyricism, and the distorted lap steel innovations Chelmis unleashes are an ode to the genre; to the music and imagery of the American south, the sprawl of the forests, a black bear darting through the yard during a barbecue with friends, a muggy summer and the impossible darkness only lit by lightning bugs when it’s real late at night.

To cite Aunty Meredith: “Rat Saw God layers all those beloved Wednesday pieces into something truly sublime. That twangy underbelly uplit by a wash of countrygaze and bright-eyed melodies. A stamp collection of ragged outsider anthems built around the small town vignettes of Karly Hartzman, whose gothic world-building conjures resplendently bleak southeastern vistas dotted with Dollar Tree discount stores, never-ending nosebleeds and cough syrup black-outs.”

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners.

Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina, Rabout riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.

Previous album Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, and a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mum hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.”

“Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority – intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness.

“Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van.

The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. 

Wednesday’s songs don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”

But the thing about Rat Saw God – and about any Wednesday song, really – is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.