Wednesday’s Rat Saw God: Southern Gothic country shoegaze played with exhilarating intensity

Wednesday’s fifth album, Rat Saw God, contains an unreasonable amount of awesomeness. The Asheville, North Carolina quintet does so many things so well on their breakout LP it’s almost not fair. I’ve heard their sound referred to as “country shoegaze” or “if Sonic Youth were from the South,” and those are apt descriptions. They play cacophonous yet highly melodic and heartfelt whisper-to-scream indie with a joyous fury and a disregard for convention that puts them in a league with their 90s influences. Their sound is huge, and exciting, and gorgeous; it shimmers and soars and flares up before detonating and floating back to earth. Like SY circa Daydream Nation, they often do that thing where they launch right into a song at a peak of intensity and keep building from there, leaving the listener breathless and wrenched out with elation. But they’re wonderfully agile too; there’s as much moody atmosphere as there is noise on the album, and they can turn on a dime between the two modes.

Wednesday defy every stereotype of the South while also embracing their Southern roots. When their music slows down and gets twangy and pretty (and it gets very pretty, even amidst all the noise), it’s suddenly quite adjacent to country. I shit you not they have a steel guitarist; and their lyrics are filled with references to quintessentially Southern and rural things: dogwood trees, turkey vultures, yellowjackets, Sunday school, and Dollywood. Look at the album cover and tell me the Southern Gothic feel is anything but intended.

All this would be more than enough to recommend them, but then they add to it a lead singer, guitarist and songwriter, Karly Hartzman, who’s on a level of greatness comparable to Courtney Barnett or Gillian Welch, and that is just an insane one-two punch.

Hartzman’s storytelling is so fascinating and wrenching and beautifully human. She’s clearly determined to peel back all the easy stereotypes and misconceptions of the South and of Appalachia and revel in the weirdness and the beauty and the fear and alienation. Her songs are populated with teenagers doing drugs out of desperate boredom and families with fucked-up histories and petty criminals and animals and ghosts and God and Jesus.

A lot of the album is autobiographical (it’s more or less a concept album about Hartzman’s childhood) but there’s also a strong sense of the absurd or even the surreal. The narratives tilt back and forth between bracing realism and poetic symbolism. Many of her lyrics are wry anecdotes like Ran the chainsaw til it ran out of gas / ‘Cause you got stung by a yellowjacket (about a mishap on a farm involving two of her bandmates, Jake Lenderman and Xandy Chelmis). At other times her stories take on the quality of visions: I saw myself dead at the end of a staircase. Sometimes she combines the two: I used to drink ’til I threw up on weeknights at my parents’ house / My friends all took Benadryl ’til they could see shit crawlin’ up the walls.

Some of this reminds me of the alternately dreamlike and nightmarish qualities of David Lynch’s fictional small towns (I had to look it up just now to doublecheck, but indeed Blue Velvet is set in North Carolina). Everyone in this place has a dark secret, or is going through some shit. There’s a sex shop off the highway with a biblical name / Nana crashed the carpool on the way to my mom’s birthday.

Beyond the tendency towards the disturbing or the melancholy, Hartzman’s songwriting has a singular ability to communicate the stubborn determination and even pride that can be found in Appalachian resignation. She begins the wonderful power ballad “Chosen to Deserve” with a warning that feels like a weary shrug:

We always started by tellin’ all our best stories first
So now that it’s been awhile, I’ll get around
To tellin’ you all my worst
Just so you know what you signed up for
What you’re dealin’ with
Just so you know what you’ve been chosen to deserve

This would make it sound country even if the band didn’t have a steel guitarist. God, make me good, but not quite yet, she sings on “Bull Believer,” as if channeling George Jones. On “Bath County”: Every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes.

Hartzman is Jewish and it’s apparent she has complicated feelings about growing up in the Bible Belt. The many references to church and Christian iconography (I can walk on water, I can raise the dead / We joined the exodus headed out from Dollywood) feel at once affectionate and ironic.

Her rural imagery is intertwined with quotidian aspects of life under neoliberal capitalism — life amidst the ugly infrastructure and corporate chain stores that clutter our built environment: a line at Panera Bread, a tragic death in a Planet Fitness parking lot, a TV at a gas pump beaming its light onto a dark highway.

More astonishing still is the way Hartzman delivers those stories. She’s an amazing singer: her voice is lovely and plaintive when she’s crooning the quiet parts of her songs; she could have had a career as a country or folk singer and no one would be the wiser. But then, abruptly, her voice will shift in tone, and she will break out into an eerie kind of yodelling, her voice wobbling in pitch, as if she’s losing control of herself as the band crashes and careens behind her. Sometimes she lets loose with actual screams that are piercing in their intensity — and exhilarating, and sublime.

Even at her most unhinged, Hartzman never loses her sharp sense of humor. Her climactic screams on “Bull Believer” evolve/devolve from her mantra-like repetition of the iconic line “Finish him!” from Mortal Kombat (the protagonist of the song is suffering a nosebleed and watching a friend play the video game on New Year’s Eve, but there’s an indication that something darker is happening too).

In the fall of 1992 I saw Throwing Muses’ Kristen Hersh open for Bob Mould at the Hollywood Palladium. I have a strong memory of the emotional force of her performance — how her keening vocals, sometimes lapsing into a ragged semi-scream, felt a bit like seeing someone have a breakdown onstage. It was so confronting that halfway through her set I felt I had to step away, back towards the rear of the ballroom; there was something triggering about it.

Rat Saw God had that same effect on me the first couple of times I listened to it, starting with the way the opening track, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” leaps right out of the gate at full throttle, with Hartzman’s and Lenderman’s screeching, clanging guitars and Chelmis’s wailing steel overpowering you within seconds as Hartzman howls “Fuck all y’all” down the wishing well. It’s suddenly over in 90 seconds but it gives you no time to catch your breath before pivoting to the ferocity of the second track, the incredible eight-and-a-half-minute epic “Bull Believer.”

I have to hand it to them for flexing like this: frontloading the epic as the second track on the album, and daring you to turn it off after that. As it happens Rat Saw God gets even better as it goes on.

As I was frozen like a deer in headlights listening to Hartzman’s screams on “Bull Believer,” Hersh sprang right to mind. If anything the album sounds like if a countrified Throwing Muses had recorded In Utero. As much as I love loud indie I felt I had to turn it down to cope; as was always the case with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain’s intensity, something about it caused my anxiety to flare up (yes, Hartzman’s songwriting reminds me of Cobain’s at times). Of course there are noisier bands; any death-metal band is noisier in terms of decibels, but Wednesday’s music hits harder because Hartzman’s cast of characters and her themes are so melancholy and emotionally resonant, and because her performance makes it feel like all of these emotions are happening in real time.

Upon repeat listens, the effect was less intimidating, and more thrilling, and the greatness of the songs was more apparent. There is so much beauty and joy here as well as melancholy and despair, and that beauty comes out in the warped yet infectious choruses that will stay with you for days and weeks, possibly because of how warped they are.

“Turkey Vultures,” the late climax of the album, has to be one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever heard on record. It begins quietly, with Hartzman singing softly over a gently strummed guitar about birds of prey gathering in her yard with a face as blank as a shovel and fired up about Jesus. But then it begins building in tempo and intensity, as a haze of oddly tuned guitars and Chelmis’s eerie steel rises up in the mix, and keeps rising until it’s a vast sound somewhere between a soothing drone and a feedback squeal, unsettling yet hair-raising, as Alan Miller’s drums rev up and it feels like an aircraft taking flight in that way that early Stereolab used to feel like a machine in motion as it crescendoes and keeps rising and keeps rising and Hartzman’s vocals are lilting and swooping and keening and you wonder how they can sustain this and you feel like you need a seatbelt — and then finally it breaks down and a minor-key bridge comes along, as if to acknowledge that the listener needs a break from the tension, before it starts climbing into the stratosphere again. Just magnificent stuff.

Several times while listening to Rat Saw God, I’ve found myself wondering if this is what it was like when Bruce Springsteen was new — to have an artist with this much power and humanism in her storytelling, leading a band this great, breaking out of obscurity and putting the rest of the music world on notice.

I make the Springsteen comparison for a couple of reasons. With their Southern perspective, and their songs about the lives working-class people live in the “flyover states,” I swear Wednesday have it in them to be a new kind of heartland rock. I admit that doesn’t sound very indie-cool, and maybe their music is too noisy and weird to fit that hoary set of tropes very comfortably.

But there are moments on Rat Saw God that are so tuneful and aching and twangy and so damn anthemic that it doesn’t feel so weird to compare them to Springsteen or Neil Young or even Tom Petty. The arena-ready riffs on “Chosen to Deserve” feel like they’re aimed squarely at this kind of heartland mode — only let’s say the heartland is burning in a climate apocalypse. “Got Shocked” sounds like Zuma-era Crazy Horse covered by My Bloody Valentine. Then there’s the sheer euphoria of “Quarry” — the way the sweet country-rock swing of the verses gives way to the spine-tingling, moshpit-inducing chorus.

They certainly didn’t come from nowhere — their 2021 album, Twin Plagues, is frankly amazing — but Harzman’s songwriting has definitely gone to another level here. It’s not that hard to imagine Wednesday reaching a lot more people and filling up arenas in the near future.

In case it’s not already obvious, Wednesday’s Southernness is key to their appeal for me. I’m not Southern myself, but my grandparents were from Arkansas, and my upbringing in Oregon very much had a Southern accent. I went to high school in Florida and Georgia, and I have family in Kentucky and West Virginia. I’ve especially spent a lot of time in West Virginia, where my parents have lived since the 90s, and for this reason in particular the Appalachian storytelling in Wednesday’s music really speaks to me.

There’s a more immediate reason for this too: in May, my 14-year-old nephew was killed by a truck in Kentucky. I flew to the States and spent a week in Winchester, Kentucky and Fairmont, West Virginia, attending the memorial service and visiting with my family for the first time in years.

I’d already decided that Rat Saw God was the album of the year before all this happened, but something about the grief and trauma of that trip to the South and to Appalachia, the intense emotions of seeing loved ones again under such difficult circumstances, and in a larger sense visiting the region during a time of political turmoil and permanent crisis, made the Southern Gothic themes of the album so real for me. It became my soundtrack for this time, and my therapy as it were.

I think as long as I live, whenever I listen to Rat Saw God I’ll think of this year and that trip and what my family has been through. It’s been my blues this year in a very real way. Comfort fools us into faith, then fate pulls us away again, Hartzman sings on “Bull Believer.”

I’m always going to be there for Southern artists who turn all the cliches of the region on their head. The ones who reject the tired traditionalism and revisionism and bigotry of the white Southern petty bourgeoisie and their go-to cultural form, right-wing country music; and who celebrate the region’s beauty and culture, its working-class history and social solidarity. This can range from the Southern-fried psych-funk of Khruangbin to R.E.M.’s transcendent jangle-pop to the B-52s’ radically inclusive party jams. Of course it also more broadly includes outlaw country singers like Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash and Dirty South rappers like OutKast.

This stuff matters because the state of the culture war in 2023 means that on the one hand we have the Jason Aldeans and the Oliver Anthonys — country singers who purport to speak for the South or for small towns while blowing dogwhistles for racists and the far right. And on the other hand we have elitist northern liberals whose contempt for the South often contains undisguised classism — those who wish the South would secede again, or who made jokes about the deadly power outages in Texas. Many northern liberals don’t seem to remember that a huge percentage of the Southern population are Black and brown and immigrant; that Republicans are a minority who control the region through gerrymandering and other forms of structural oppression; that the South has a proud history of leftist organizing and resistance; that indeed there are queer and trans folks living there (despite the best efforts of Republicans to drive them out). The memes about rednecks are a lot easier to digest, I guess.

Hartzman is explicit and lucid about all of this. Check out what she says about the South in her interview with The Forty-Five:

I’ve noticed from reading a lot of other Southern writers and lyricists that when you try to describe the South, that’s the tone that naturally comes up, because there is so much horrible stuff you have to accept and move through to live here — you have to have a sense of humour about it…

That’s one of the things about the South that appeals to me; there’s so much to improve on. By caring about those things, you can actually contribute to making a place better…

At the end of the day, it’s the politics that takes advantage of the disenfranchised here, but you’ll also meet the people who are the most passionate against those issues. It’s a really disheartening place to live, but it’s also really invigorating because the people have to work five times harder to get good work done here. We’re just historically so regressive, or, at least the people in power are.

R.E.M keeps coming to mind. Wednesday’s music doesn’t have a great deal in common with R.E.M.’s on the surface, but both bands’ early work shares a stubborn rejection of typical Southern identity, while also eschewing the expectations of the New York–L.A. music-industry-axis, and at the same time mining the South’s culture and folklore to create a new kind of Southern mythology. It feels worth noting that R.E.M.’s first EP, Chronic Town, and first two albums, Murmur and Reckoning, were all recorded in North Carolina (in Winston-Salem and in Charlotte).

I’ve been listening to Murmur a lot again lately because this year is the 40th anniversary of its release, and I’ve been remembering what an important album it was for me when I was in high school in the late 80s. We moved to Georgia in the winter of my junior year, in 1988, just when that album was new to me, and I felt like its atmosphere, embodied in the spooky Southern Gothic image of overgrown kudzu on the cover, had taken over my consciousness. The chilly overcast skies and brown woods and fields, the decrepit brick buildings lining the Chattahoochee River, and the depressing truck stops were the perfect embodiment of songs like “Talk About the Passion” and “Laughing.”

As someone who was raised on country music, it was so vital for me, during that difficult time when I was going through adolescence and depression and plunging into punk and alternative and didn’t know who I was anymore, to discover a band from the South who were able to make “Southern rock” that sounded like anything but, and who could conversely take the liberating sound of postpunk and make it sound somehow Southern.

This is a long way of saying that Wednesday do that exact same thing for me. And I think the fact that Rat Saw God is explicitly about teen alienation makes these connections more vivid and present for me. The way Hartzman relates all these wistful, instrospective, at times fucked-up, but always relatable stories about her youth has a way of putting me in the same mentality. Found out who I was and it wasn’t pretty.

Side note: I just want to point out that I love all the promo photos of the band hanging out in the lush greenery and flowers of the North Carolina summertime. And I love that Hartzman doesn’t take it for granted: “Damn, I live in the best place ever,” she told Variety. “Just sitting on my front porch, that’s what I live for.”

I describe Wednesday’s music as shoegaze for a few reasons, though I’m sure gatekeepers may quibble. The gauzy, wobbly, distorted layers of guitars that characterize songs like “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” and “Turkey Vultures” are to me very reminiscent of MBV’s Isn’t Anything, the more muscular, more propulsive, more song-oriented predecessor to Loveless. This is shoegaze in its original sense before it was codified into a set of tropes around somnambulant dream pop with very specific guitar-pedal sounds. Shoegaze shouldn’t be about a particular style (just think of how different shoegaze innovators Ride, Lush and MBV actually are), but about indie rock freed from convention to be as expansive and trippy and emotive as possible.

This broader definition lets you see the connection to proto-shoegaze bands like Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr., all of whom were transformative for me in that same difficult year of 1988. There’s something about Rat Saw God that reminds me so clearly of when I first heard Dinosaur Jr.’s “Repulsion” on a compilation tape — the way the guitars waver and lurch between pretty chord progressions and distortion, there’s a visceral effect it had on me, a physical feeling in my stomach that Wednesday brings back quite forcefully. And by the way, the fact that Wednesday create their own distinctive woozy shifting sound with a steel guitar is so dope.

There’s also a case to be made that Wednesday are more nugrunge than nugaze, as I’ve indicated with the Nirvana comparison. Grunge at its best was always about giving voice to the alienation of American youth, especially in regions away from the major urban centers. In that sense you could say it was always about the blues (Wednesday’s country chops are a poignant reminder of the blues undercurrent that runs through all of rock). And before it crossed into the mainstream and devolved into a bunch of cliches about masculinity and rawk, grunge was very inclusive and challenging of gender and other social norms. Hartzman has a little Courtney Love in her as well as Courtney Barnett — especially in the way the unearthly power of her voice communicates honesty and pain.

I know it gets tedious when someone my age has to constantly compare new bands to those of my generation but there we are. You live long enough, you accumulate a lot of reference points to compare new music with — this is true even if you embrace new sounds, which I most certainly do. But splitting hairs about shoegaze versus grunge or whatever is pointless after a while. Wednesday’s sound is very much based on synthesis — of indie and country, of experimental noise and populist rock, of Lucinda Williams and Sonic Youth. What makes them so damn exciting is how they weave their many influences into something that reminds you of all your favorite music while feeling completely original. This is the essence of a great band, and Rat Saw God is that band’s early masterpiece.

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Feature image photo credit: Zachary Chick