Wednesday, Hotline TNT, and Lowertown at Brooklyn Steel

On Thursday, January 25, 2024, the tour featuring Asheville, NC’s Wednesday and New York City’s Hotline TNT arrived to Brooklyn Steel for a sold out show in Brooklyn, NY. The bill also featured Lowertown, who previously shared the same stage with Wet Leg in 2022.

I covered the show for Brooklyn Steel and the gallery of Wednesday and Hotline TNT is now available on “The House List” here.

Images of all three acts can also be found above.

Wednesday Album Review: Rat Saw God

(Dead Oceans)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

In a minute and a half, Wednesday reveal their palate and ethos. “Hot Rotten Grass Smell”, the opening track to their incredible new album Rat Saw God, immediately juxtaposes country guitars with shoegaze squall. Songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Karly Hartzman references Smog’s “The Well” before turning inward to a bleak vision: “Your closet froze after you left / Except the people who took your shirts / Closed off your door with yellow tape / Saw myself dead at the end of a staircase.” The song ends with a sudden cut to field recordings of peepers. Heartbreak, anxiety, life, death, both the natural environment and the concrete depression of the South. It’s all there for Hartzman’s poetry, and no moment is too small or too ordinary for worship.

Hartzman’s a true blue country singer, combining Angel Olsen’s crying wail with Lucinda Williams’ deadpan drawl, and she sports the observational prowess to match. The band’s unique aesthetic, a combination of twangy indie rock with overwhelming fuzz, spans eras of music and only serves to emphasize the universality and perennial nature of her themes. If on the band’s previous album Twin Plagues, Hartzman first practiced putting her vulnerabilities to tape, she’s doubly honest on Rat Saw God. “The racecar driver died on TV / I ran like hell into the burning house / It’d been too long since I had felt the sting,” she sings on “Got Shocked”, a reminder that feeling is living. On the same song, a cricket jumps behind a fridge and stays there for two days. You’re forced to ask yourself, “Who would I rather be?” Yet, songs like “Formula One” and “Chosen To Deserve”--the former using the same car racing motif--occupy different spaces of the heart. They’re sweet dedications to her partner, Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman, whose nasally backup vocals beautifully complement Hartzman’s coos on “Formula One”, whose riffs (along with Xandy Chelmis’ prickly pedal steel) propel Hartzman “tellin’ you all my worst” on “Chosen to Deserve”. “If you’re lookin’ for me / I’m in the back of an SUV / Doin’ it in some cul-de-sac / Underneath a dogwood tree,” Hartzman hilariously declares on “Chosen to Deserve”, wearing her warts not like badges of honor but as simply and sincerely formative parts of her past. 

Wednesday expertly build tension alongside Hartzman’s stories, a necessary representation of how bad things compound in real life. On “Turkey Vultures”, an increasingly desperate narrator tries to create deeper meaning from tragedy; Alan Miller’s drums gradually change tempo until the song pummels, Lenderman’s guitars squealing with pain. “Bull Believer” follows a similar pattern, albeit over an epic 8 and a half minutes. It’s a song about watching someone succumb to addiction, or the desire for a merciful end to the worst, but just like bull in a bullfight, it’s often death by a million stabs. As Hartzman recalls watching someone play Mortal Kombat, she cleverly chants the game’s famous catchphrase, “Finish him!”, but dragged out to a squirming length, as she lets out piercing out-of-breath screams and cries. It’s the type of catharsis that allows her, emotionally exhausted, to look at the fictional characters of “Quarry”, or the real person who overdosed in a Dollywood parking lot on “Bath County”, with zero judgement, just as much empathy as Bill Callahan before her.

That Rat Saw God ends with the unassuming road song “TV in the Gas Pump” is entirely fitting. The titular object “blares into the dark.” What could be more plain? Life goes on, minutiae are at once endlessly boring on the surface, limitlessly interesting if you stop for a moment. Wednesday implore us to observe and share.

Rat Saw God- Wednesday

There have been plenty of great records that have come out in 2023 so far, but very few records have captured that simultaneous self-assured, slow-build accumulation of talent and experience with a real genuine sense of idiosyncratic expression akin to something like the latest records from Big Thief or Waxahatchee. Enter the band Wednesday, who released their 5th LP, Rat Saw God, last month after years of following along a natural progression of steady touring and releasing records that have just gotten better and better (RSG follows this trend with aplomb). Wednesday have plenty of tried and true touchstones (they couldn't be any more unabashed about their love for Drive By Truckers and The Smashing Pumpkins, and I can hear more than a little Neil Young and The Swirlies in their sound) but on RSG their warped and weary americana manifests in songs that are better realized, more thrilling, and exude far more personality than almost everything else that I've listened to from 2023. RSG is a loud, deeply unsettling record that brims with some of the most cathartic music that I've ever listened to.

Wednesday are a 4 piece consisting of vocalist/guitarist Karly Hartman, guitarist/vocalist MJ Lenderman, lap steelist Xandy Chelmis, and drummer Alan Miller (RSG was recorded with the addition of bassist Margo Schultz who has since left the band) that splits the difference between alternative country, shoegaze, and classic indie rock. Their earliest music was far more indebted to classic shoegaze, with blistering waves of feedback accentuating the harrowing details of Hartzman's bleak small-town narratives. As they progressed the music became richer and more multifaceted if not necessarily less noisy, and Hartzman's harrowing storytelling became more striking and inimitable. Wednesday started as Hartzman's solo project before the other members joined the fold, and while they've been playing as a proper band for years now (Lenderman co-wrote some of the songs on their early EPs) this is still unmistakably Hartzman's project. All of the songs on RSG were written by Hartzman and performed by the full band, which only amplifies the record's singular point of view despite exuding an inclusive communal feel in no small part due to the remarkable amount of chemistry among the band members.

RSG doesn't exactly push Wednesday's sound in any new directions, it simply refines and amplifies everything that they had been doing well for the last several years. Lenderman's solos are nastier and more dynamic, Hartzman's writing has gotten darker and more specific, and the band are writing and playing rich, multifaceted songs that don't necessarily invite themselves to easy listening despite an impressive command of melody. Wednesday have been tagged with the "country-gaze" tag since the jump, and while it's by no means entirely misleading it certainly misses the full scope of what they're doing. The music is raw, unsettling, noisy, twangy, and deeply human above all else. There are understated songs like "What's So Funny" that sound so wispy and formless that they might blow away in the wind jutting up against noisy, life-affirming shoegaze freakouts like "Bull Believer" in a way that not only sounds completely logical, but like the most natural pairing of sounds and sensibilities imaginable. It's part and parcel of Wednesday's gift that they can carve out space for and honor all of their influences while still making cohesive statements that sound true to themselves.

At 10 songs in 37 minutes, RSG is a bad-vibes sprint that's anchored by two particularly muscular singles ("Bad Believer", and "Chosen to Deserve", respectively) and consists of several other songs that are more succinct but no less sinister. Opener "Hot Rotten Grass Smell" needs barely more than a minute and a half for the band to set the record's tone with a storm of squealing feedback and Hartzman's forlorn tone, but the impression lingers like the titular smell. While RSG on the whole is loud more often than not (distortion-laced freakouts inevitably erupt at some point on most of these songs) it still offers a few breathers like "Formula One", and "What's So Funny", both of which scan as fairly straightforward country rock fare rendered with a caustic eye for detail, regardless of their specific context on RSG. On the other end of the spectrum we have those aforementioned singles, which are easily among Wednesday's most ambitious songs to date. "Chosen to Deserve" gets a ton of mileage out of Lenderman's massive southern rock riff and a plethora of particularly unsettling imagery from Hartzman, while "Bull Believer" begins as a noisy indie rock romp before transitioning into several minutes of hair-raising shrieks from Hartzman as she's encircled by trudging shoegaze guitars. The sonics shift, but the tone persists.

Since RSG was written entirely by Hartzman and recorded with the full band the music is heightened by the deft chemistry between band members but the writing still manages to retain a singular perspective. It's unclear how much of RSG is auto-biographic, but it's clear that these 10 unsettling songs are deeply felt missives from life spent growing up in the American south. Hartzman's writing hits a new peak throughout RSG as her lens fix themselves on a wide range of topics that span sour relationships "I sat on the stairs with a never-ending nosebleed/You were playing Mortal Kombat" ("Bad Believer"), Benadryl overdoses "One of those times my friend took a little too much/He had to get his stomach pumped" ("Formula One"), overpass vehicle destruction "Truck was too tall for the overpass/Got the top ripped off, didn't see it happen/Just saw the aftermath" ("Formula One"), and so much more with striking specificity. The strongest writing emerges on the record's second half in the form of gripping short stories brimming with personality. "Quarry" in particular is a masterful exercise in dispensing detail while sustaining tension as the band dovetail from one increasingly rich verse to the next before the song culminates in a substantial drug bust. RSG is far from an easy album to stomach, but it's unlikely that you'll find another 2023 album that makes you feel as alive.

Essentials: “Quarry”, “Bull Believer”, “Bath County”

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 6pm ET: Feature LP: Wednesday - Rat Saw God (2023)

Wednesday is an American band from Asheville, North Carolina, currently signed to Dead Oceans. The band consists of vocalist Karly Hartzman, guitarist Jake Lenderman, lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, and drummer Alan Miller. Wednesday was formed in 2017 as Karly Hartzman’s personal songwriting project. Rat Saw God is the fifth studio album by American rock band Wednesday, released by Dead Oceans…

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Wednesday - Rat Saw God

Third album from the North Carolina indie rock band produced by Alex Farrar and recorded in a week

7/13

There’s something about the South that’s sort of impossible to explain. It has this je ne sais quoi that hovers like the sticky humidity-you can’t pinpoint it, but you can feel it in the air. It comes in flashes, the machine guns, crushed Four Loko cans, stock car races, Bible verse bumper stickers and awkward glances around the classroom when you get abstinence-only sex education, feel like heat lightning. It’s sacrilegious and sacred, it’s pregaming in a church parking lot before heading to the high-school football game. Wednesday, get it. They lived it. On their latest album, Rat Saw God, out today via Dead Oceans, they capture the off-kilter magic of one of the most confusing places.

Written in the weeks following their 2021 break-out, Twin Plagues, Karly Hartzman (guitar/vocals), MJ Lenderman (guitar), Margo Schulz (bass), Alan Miller (drums) and Xandy Chelmis (lap steel) continue to create a chaotic haze spliced by recollections of fervent specifics. They combine spellbinding shoegaze with their blue-grass roots, leaving you wondering if they’re staring down at a pair of well-worn Converse or cowboy boots while they play. Despite the odds, they make steel pedals and dense Slowdive-esque riffs make sense.

They say you can’t choose where you’re from, but you can choose where you go and in a way, that’s exactly what Wednesday does. It’s like driving a second-hand pick-up truck while blasting Swirlies-you’re charting your own course, but there are some things you can’t shake. However, Wednesday is fearless in the face of collisions. Even on “Chosen To Deserve,” a should-be straightforward love song, Hartzman takes a detour to talk about hooking up at the end of a cul de sac and a friend that took so much Benadryl they had to get their stomach pumped. They frequently overlap the gritty and the gorgeous like in “Bath County” when religious references are followed up by someone getting hit with a dose of Narcan in a two-door sedan.

This lyrical precision is what makes the record shine, the fact that Hartzman can recall the exact video game, in this case, Mortal Kombat, that someone was playing when her nose started bleeding at a New Year’s Eve party she didn’t even want to be at. There’s something striking in how sentimental the details feel, how she can weave these intimate narratives out of “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta,” and a Planet Fitness parking lot that makes their country-gaze so alluring. It feels like sitting on your front-porch stoop with a bunch of old friends playing a scatter-brained game of “remember when?”

It’s these niche instances that make Rat Saw God feel like a piece of collection consciousness instead of personal mythology. You can’t help but see a little bit of yourself in their vignettes. For some reason, the kid that burned down a cornfield and the girl whose house was “a front for a mob thing” on “Quarry” feel like people you’ve met before, figments of small-town folklore that make you nod your head and say “yeah I think I’ve heard that story before.” It’s all in Hartmzan’s earnest delivery, how her vocals seem to beg you not to forget what happened even if it didn’t make headlines.

While this imagery carries an innate sense of emotion, there are moments on the album where Hartzman’s one-liners serve as a knock-out punch. Over sedated chords on “What’s so Funny,” she trapezes from talking about running a chainsaw until it ran out of gas to lamenting, “Nothing will ever be as vivid as the darkest time in my life.” These confessions come out of the blue, undecorated and direct, the way things in life sometimes do, leaving you with no pretty metaphors or double meanings to use for damage control. These confrontations happen sonically as well, like in their eight-minute epic “Bull Believer,” when following Hartzman’s shrill command to “Finish him,” a deluge of wailing guitars and apocalyptic percussion make it clear that there’s no changing fate. It’s a swift delivery that feels more like an execution, another instance where Wednesday is forced to face things head on-and they never flinch.

Whether they express it through private symbolism or get straight to the point, it doesn’t matter. Wednesday is the woman who thinks “America” is “a spoiled little child” but still gives out king-sized candy bars on Halloween. They’re the kids with crew cuts and the rest stop on the way to Dollywood. They’re the exhilaration of sneaking into the neighborhood pool and only going to school three days a week. They’re everything they document on Rat Saw God and more.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/wednesday/wednesday-rat-saw-god-review

#4 - MJ Lenderman - TV Dinners (2021)

What it is: a distortion-packed country-jam about ennui and alienation. What I like about it: I love the distorted, overdriven, messy country sound. I absolutely adore pedal steel, and this song is driven by a bunch of very nice, playful pedal steel from Xandy Chelmis. I really like the controlled, intentional use of sloppiness to convey an intended aesthetic and emotion. The lyrics are simple and unintrusive but match the tone of the rest very well. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and sounds like a lost B side from a never-was freak-country band in the late 70s/early 80s.

Wednesday - “TV in the Gas Pump”

Photo by Zachary Chick

Though there is a newfound concise nature within Wednesday’s alt-country navel-gazing that’s turning heads the way of the Asheville rockers’ anticipated fifth studio effort, Rat Saw God, the inverse of stylistic clarity is that which resonates deeper spells just as well as they do on the album’s late-blooming highlight and closer, “TV in the Gas Pump”. Something is in the air here of this listen, drifting through eye-view and ear-length almost like an orb visiting the scenery beneath it, fascinating by the mundane. Guitarist and vocalist Karly Hartzman is lyrically obtuse in her descriptors of walking through a daze of rural life, right down to the Dollar General, Panera Bread and Starbucks as her words sway along the wavy moves guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Schulz, drummer Alan Miller, and multi-instrumental lap steel pro Xandy Chelmis create as a near-molecular particle moving between cohesion and gentle bubble burst against tints of sunlight, hot street haze, and oxygen swirling around them. Perhaps that gas pump is leaking or maybe it’s the caffeine high, but Wednesday make the everyday wallpaper of life sound like something worth sinking deeper into.

Directed by: Approved

Wednesday’s Rat Saw God will be released April 7th on Dead Oceans.