Wednesday Create an Ode To 21st Century Ugliness and Beauty
Reviewing the indie-rockers daring and poetic fifth album ‘Rat Saw God’
Wednesday are that rare and deeply special indie-rock band whose music embodies the best qualities of 90s indie-rock (some would say, the genre’s golden age) without ever feeling like a nostalgia act. One listen to the band’s latest LP will make clear the quartet’s central influences — My Bloody Valentine, Liz Phair, American Football, among them — yet the sentiments of their songs are unmistakably 21st century. Rat Saw God is an unvarnished and utterly un-romanticised portrait of life in the 2020s; filled with grim imagery of drunkenness, deprivation, depression and isolation.
Lead singer Karly Hartzman is a truly special vocalist, with the sort of evocative, deadpan drawl that evokes Phair’s classic Exile in Guyville. She presents everything from the smell of rotten grass to images of violent deaths and overdoses with the same sardonic, over-it, conversational, world-weary tone. It’s quintessentially of-the-moment — a document of a time where historically-unprecedented disasters are just regular news stories that get quickly lost amidst a sea of ever more alarming content.
The album’s two big centrepieces happen to be its two lead singles, though they demonstrate diverging strengths from the band. The first is an eight-and-a-half-minute epic “Bull Believer”, beginning as a grimy depiction of the unbearable cruelty of bull fighting, it evolves into a soaring epic of mundane anecdotes blown up to monumental proportions. This is Hartzman’s gift — turning tales of playing Mortal Kombat, watering down liquor and skipping school into essential puzzle pieces of the meaning of our existence. The song ends with feral cries of “finish him” and a truly grimy electric guitar arrangement courtesy of MJ Lendermann. It’s surely one of the most cathartic musical moments in recent memory.
The second highlight, “Chosen To Deserve” is a comparatively concise alt-country banger, and the closest thing to a love song you can imagine the band creating. It juxtaposes mundane imagery (like teenage partying and drinking) with the alarming (most notably, a benadryl overdose resulting in hospitalisation). Peaking through these enthralling verses is a highly catchy, one-line refrain: “I’m the girl that you were chosen to deserve”. It all results in a very modern love song — a plainly spoken ode to finding love in a dirty, unforgiving world that seems to have given up on you, and that you often feel like giving up on.
The scuzzy riffs, and often pummelling sound, is plenty rewarding in and of itself, but it’s Hartzman’s words — and her delivery of them — that makes Rat Saw God such an essential album. Her deadpan delivery and litany of mundanities make her easy to discount and underestimate, but be under no doubt that to do so poses a far greater risk to your own credibility than to the band’s. Listen close enough and you’ll find that hidden between anecdotes about “piss coloured” Fanta and listening to the Drive-By Truckers are moments of real poetic beauty — be it a stark confessional on “What’s So Funny?” (“Nothing will ever be as vivid as [the] Darkest time of my life”) or a compelling metaphor about repeated self-destruction on “Formula One” (“Bird flies into the window every day at the same time / It’ll never learn, but it also wouldn’t die”). It’s this quality that ensures the album remains captivating even as the music approaches predictability in the second half.
Rat Saw God is sure to be one of the odder album titles of 2023, and it’s made odder by the fact that those words are never muttered throughout the album’s 37 minutes. But it’s a fitting name under which to categorise these 10 songs. The characters that litter the band’s fifth LP often feel akin to rats — reviled and disregarded by most of society, content to live their lives dirtily and underground. But within a sea of dirty, wearisome anecdotes and recollections are moments of profundity and even grace — glimpses of an illusive bigger picture and the reason why we keep forging ahead day after day.