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Mosh jacksonville1/26/2024 “Heard someone died in the Planet Fitness parking lot,” Hartzman sings on “Bath County.” “Fire trucks rolled in and people stood around.”Īnd the songs go hard, harder than anything on the band’s previous albums. Death, violence, drug abuse and one gnarly “never-ending nosebleed” blur together against the backdrop of nail salons, Panera Breads, Sunday schools, Dollywood, Dollar Trees and sex shops tucked off highways with biblical names. Its strength exists in its strikingly creepy - even grotesque - lyricism and the ways in which she and her bandmates build their twangy, layered sound to support it, as Hartzman maps out a strip-mall ridden wasteland that feels pulled straight from the pages of Ghost World. But Rat Saw God feels like the clearest incarnation of the band’s vision, which is to say it’s the grungiest. Initially a Hartzman solo project, across three albums of original music and a covers collection Wednesday has steadily complicated its sound with each new release. There’s no pig’s squeal in Hartzman’s country warble, but listening to the music here you might feel the dread of waiting around to be slaughtered all the same. The Asheville, N.C., band’s fifth album, out April 7, is a beautifully bleak record that spins up country, shoegaze, suburban nightmares and youthful debauchery into a thrilling work of distorted Americana. “There’s pain in both music.” It’s at this border - of dramatic country sorrow and clever punk disaffection - where Wednesday’s Rat Saw God exists. “Country and punk music aren’t too different,” Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman recently told NME. In Wednesday’s rattling, furious rock, better at home in DIY punk venues than any honky-tonk, she sometimes lets her voice spiral out, as she does on the eight-minute epic “Bull Believer,” until there aren’t any words to even hear tears in, because it’s all just screaming. Or she can summon the vibrating, heartbroken tones of the late outlaw king Gary Stewart on the band’s cover of “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin Doubles),” as the band transforms the classic into something to mosh to, as I once witnessed live. She can do it sweet and straight, as she did on the underrated and uncharacteristically soft “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do” from 2021’s Twin Plagues, singing of feeling “jealous of the rooms whose floors can feel your weight upon them” over pristine steel guitar. She’s got a yodeling, folksy, country music cry. When Wednesday‘s Karly Hartzman sings, I hear a tear in every word. Wednesday’s Rat Saw God is powered by singer Karly Hartzman’s strikingly creepy - even grotesque - lyricism and the way the band builds a twangy, layered sound to support it. Wynette thought she sounded like a squealing pig. That singing was precisely why Wynette never wanted to release the song - begged Sherrill not to, actually. It’s on “Stand By Your Man,” of course, where you can hear those tears gather into a full-on breakdown, that voice twisting into a wail with every high note. Wynette had the ability to sell songs like “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” or “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” ’60s suburban melodramas as flat as paper dolls, with a devastation that rendered them into full-bodied human tragedies, her voice starting and halting like a broken train sputtering to its destination. It was the first lady of country music’s signature: a trembling, anguished voice that seemed to hold a teardrop in each note. There was “a tear in every word,” is how longtime producer Billy Sherrill once described Tammy Wynette’s singing voice.
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