In recent months the buzz around Wednesday’s new album has grown, to the point that, with almost no one having heard it, it already seemed destined to occupy a privileged position on the lists that the specialized media will publish at the end of the year.
It is always curious to observe how they create this type of hypes that often seem spontaneous, even if they are not, when it is not directly noticeable that they are totally artificial. In the case at hand, something will have to do with the fact that his fifth album, Rat Saw God, may be their debut for Dead Oceans, the same label that publishes Phoebe Bridgers, Japanese Breakfast and Mitsky, three artists who have very good press, but I’m inclined to think it’s more out of a genuine desire for more people to meet a band that it’s really worth it. And it is that Wednesdays are really worth it.
Last year, the band released Moving The Leaves Instead Of Piling ‘Em Up, an EP of covers that included songs by Drive By Truckers, Vic Chesnutt, Medicine or The Smashing Pumpkins, indicating the cardinal points of their sound. On the one hand, the attachment to roots music that is part of the soundscape of North Carolina, and that is manifested in some cadences, vocal harmonies and pedal steel touches typical of country, in addition to a narrative will rich in details and descriptions. . On the other, their love for distorted guitars, from grunge to shoegaze, which they adopted as teenagers and which prompted them to want to be part of a band. If Sonic Youth had formed in rural America instead of New York, they would possibly sound quite a bit like Wednesday.
Rat Saw God It brilliantly exposes this collision of influences that have been maturing since 2017 and that has its maximum expression in ‘Chosen To Deserve’. If you only have time to listen to one song of theirs, start with this one because it perfectly defines what they are in their most accessible form.
The quintet exploits the 1990s storm/calm formula, but in an unpredictable way. The eight minutes of ‘Bull Believer’ are a sonorous storm in which Karly Hartzman goes from a whisper to a torn-out scream, getting you fully inside a mind overwhelmed by an environment in which drugs, the economic recession and violence have caused havoc.
These are stories that we have seen in documentaries about the opioid crisis or the rise of Trumpism, but here they take on a more poetic vision, although no less scathing. If shoegaze or noise bands are sometimes content to simply shock us on a sensory level, Wednesday have the added merit of integrating it into songs like ‘Bath Country’, ‘Quarry’ or ‘Turkey Vultures’ in which what and how are just as important.
JORDI MEYA
