If some bands embody the zeitgeist and most spend their careers chasing it, North Carolina’s Wednesday are one of those rare groups having the zeitgeist thrust upon them.
A week after Beabadoobee bagged the first number one album for Gen Z UK grunge, and just hours after Post Malone became the latest in a swathe of A-list stars to announce a country album, this grunge-country five-piece (bingo!) wandered onto the stage of a sold-out Scala and started tuning up like a Nashville open mic night randomly blessed by the cultural gods.
Boasting a sound that fused sumptuous country with the wiry grunge pop of Throwing Muses and the more gruesome chunks of My Bloody Valentine (a concoction you might call hoofgaze) they were a ready-made perfect rock storm long in the brewing.
Singer Karly Hartzman – a renowned purveyor of gritty Southern storytelling, dressed for the Nascar derby in trucker’s cap and antique Home Taping is Killing Music t-shirt – declared the show a midpoint between celebrating last year’s acclaimed fifth album Rat Saw God and showcasing their as-yet-unannounced sixth, and they sounded powerfully evolved.
New songs like Pick up that Knife and Wound Up Here slipped dynamically between sections of frail alt-country melody and brutal, pummelling sludge rock. Turkey Vultures accelerated from a pulsing ballad to a pounding panic attack freak-out. Billboard grew to a huge churning noise that was less sonic cathedral, more sonic barnyard.
Much was worn on Hartzman’s sleeve. Her influences for one: no sooner had the drunk kids in Bath County driven home from Dollywood playing “Drive-By Truckers songs real loud” than Wednesday covered that cosmic country rock band’s Women Without Whiskey, with guitarist Jake Lenderman (who also releases solo music as MJ Lenderman) taking vocals.
And Hartzman’s songs were unflinching, often autobiographical depictions of dustbowl despair. Chosen to Deserve couched tales of teenage binge drinking, car sex and drug overdoses in Hartzman’s forlorn croon and Xandy Chelmis’s silken lap steel. And the crowd sang heartily along with Quarry; vignettes from a down-at-heels community where lice-riddled children “fight in the yard in their underwear” and police pull mob guns and contraband from the drywall of a warring couple’s house.
Hartzman’s politics got a defiant airing too. “I’ll be screaming to alleviate some of the sadness I have about what’s happening in Gaza,” she said before the crashes of the Pixies-esque Bull Believer kicked in, declaring the conflict (“as a Jewish person”) a “f***ing genocide”.
If the universe is going to award a band this mighty with an unexpected soapbox, by god they’ll shout from it.
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