Wednesday’s vividly expressive Rat Saw God veers almost constantly between extremes: soft and loud, fast and slow, mundane and extraordinary. The Ashville band’s songs can be gentle and melodic at one moment, and aggressive and even violent in the next, cycling through an eclectic range of influences, from grunge to shoegaze to country-style balladry.
Singer Karly Hartzman takes a similarly collage-like approach to her lyrics, largely eschewing conventional narrative in favor of quilting together memories and images from her past: “I went to school about three days out of the week/Watered down all the liquor/And then pissed outside in the street,” she confesses on “Chosen to Deserve.” You’ve heard plenty of noisy rock songs about teen angst, and probably even more twangy tunes about life on the road, but rarely do the two mix so freely as they do throughout the album.
That doesn’t mean that Rat Saw God lacks for focus. All of the wobbling between tempos and styles might sound haphazard, but it’s executed with precision. And Hartzman’s snatches of Americana imagery—rain-rotted houses, parking lots, “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta”—ultimately cohere into an evocative portrait of the fringes of American life.
The album’s first 10 minutes introduce a level of manic intensity. The 96-second intro, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” intermingles abrasive blasts of distortion with clean guitar strumming and cricket sounds before transitioning quickly into the audacious eight-and-a-half-minute “Bull Believer.” Had this energy been sustained throughout the entire album, it would probably have made for an exhausting experience.
As the band careens between chaotic noise and quavering quietude, Hartzman obliquely references the trappings of depression and addiction, drilling down on hyper-specific images that endow the songs with a visceral sense of time and place: “Passed out on a couch at a New Year’s party/I sat on the stairs with a never-ending nosebleed/You were playing Mortal Kombat.” Anyone who’s played that game will recognize the phrase that she then repeats over the lengthy outro: “Finish him!” Eventually the words turn into anguished shrieks, the guitars into static, as if Hartzman didn’t want to relive this particular memory so much as exorcise it.
Wednesday seems to get much of their aggression out in that opening salvo, and the rest of Rat Saw God makes for a brisk, lean listen. Distortion becomes more intermittent, allowing Hartzman’s melodies to come to the fore, and disappears entirely on “Formula One,” a quiet country weeper featuring Hartzman and guitarist Jake Lenderman sweetly harmonizing about late nights spent lying in bed together. But that’s the exception on an album that continually plays with contrasting dynamics, as on “Turkey Vultures,” which starts out slow but proceeds in a constant state of escalation, like a car with its brakes cut.
A more consistent feature on Rat Saw God is the idiosyncratic interplay between Lenderman’s fuzzed-out shoegaze stylings and the country-fried interjections of pedal/lap steel player Xandy Chelmis. On “Quarry,” they alternate scraping dissonance with twangy string-bending while Hartzman remembers some unsavory neighbors who turned out to be “a front for a mob thing,” all set to a zippy “Waterloo Sunset”-style melody. These songs display the band’s ability to blur their influences together as deftly as they can tempos and guitar tones.
Elsewhere, “Chosen to Deserve” is a sterling account of a youth spent getting high, fucking up, and somehow living to tell about it. The song pays homage to “Let There Be Rock,” the seminal anthem by Southern storytellers and Wednesday tourmates Drive-By Truckers (who get namechecked in another song here, “Bath County”). More specifically, you can recognize that band’s influence in the big, crashing guitar riff—which bears resemblance to another DBT classic, “Women Without Whiskey”—and hyper-specific references to tripping on Benadryl.
But unlike on “Let There Be Rock,” there’s no synchronized guitar solo on “Chosen to Deserve” to signal that Hartzman has emerged triumphant over her demons. Instead, she offers a resigned and open-ended conclusion: “Now all the drugs are getting’ kinda borin’ to me/Now everywhere is loneliness and it’s in everything.” If the glorious turmoil of Rat Saw God is any indication, she may still be working out who her past has made her into.
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