Wednesday at The Ritz
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
Wednesday
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Karly Hartzman writes about people the way a good short-story writer does: with non-judgemental precision, letting detail do the emotional work. In ‘Gary’s II’, she recounts the story of a 33-year-old man who gets his teeth knocked out in a case of mistaken identity, later kneecapping his fishing-hat-clad attacker and getting winced at by a dentist. She tells it all in the same flat tone – the violence, the retaliation, the dentist telling the poor lad he needs dentures. “I always did wonder how your teeth stayed so nice,” she signs off, “when the only thing you drink is Pepsi”.
Wednesday’s sixth album Bleeds is also their: 12 songs about ordinary American life, and the people living on various edges of it. Hartzman provides the character vignettes and brilliantly vivid imagery – “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline / a pitbull puppy pissin’ off a balcony” – and her bandmates, including the omnipresent MJ Lenderman on guitar and Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel, fill them in with country warmth, indie-pop hooks and squealy, noisy sludge.
Hartzman’s voice is as central to Wednesday as her writing, and Bleeds shows its full range. On ‘Elderberry Wine’ it’s almost unbearably sweet, sentimentalising pickled eggs over twangy pedal steel. On ‘Wasp’, a late-album sucker punch, it’s never sounded more corrosive, with Hartzman full-on screaming what are actually pretty beautiful and vulnerable lyrics: “My life is a spider web / built into the doorway / When you walk in you duck your head.”
Produced by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, Bleeds was appropriately lapped up by critics – an 8.7 from Pitchfork, the rock album of the year from NPR, the year’s best alt-rock release from The Guardian. The band seem chuffed with the record, too. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,” Hartzman has said. “We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out – and I feel like we did.”
Seems there hasn’t been a better moment yet to catch Wednesday live.
