They broke up before their new album was finished. But this isn’t an indie Fleetwood Mac

3 months ago 44

Karly Hartzman has plenty of stories to tell.

Wednesday, Bleeds

Don’t go looking for clues about the break-up between Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman on the new Wednesday album. The two of them are so private that they even hid the news from their bandmates until after Bleeds was done and dusted, making this the opposite narrative to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

In the lead-up to the album’s release, Hartzman said that she liked the album title because when she writes and plays music, “I feel like I’m almost in a way bloodletting and exorcising a demon”.

You can hear that on Wasp, an 86-second blast of distorted hardcore, with Hartzman a throat-shredding banshee at the microphone, screaming “My life is a spiderweb built into the doorway – when you walk in, you duck your head.”

It’s fair warning. This band can make a fine racket: Reality TV Arguments Bleeds and Wound Up Here (By Holdin On) share the lurching, gangly DNA of Pavement, intercut with bursts of woozy overdrive that suggest My Bloody Valentine got a good airing in the band members’ various bedrooms back in the day.

Wednesday features former couple, guitarist MJ Lenderman (top right) and singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman (front).

Elsewhere, the bloodletting is a quieter, more private thing. Both The Way Love Goes and Carolina Murder Suicide are hushed ballads, the latter a gut-punch of a thing about a family torn apart, the story delivered in a drowsy smear of instrumentation, everything sepia-tinged and tear-stained.

Lead single Elderberry Wine is a country canter featuring crying pedal steel, with Hartzman’s wistful twang and Lenderman’s reedy vocals intertwined on a song about love needing all the right elements to blossom between two people, and how easily things can die without those necessary things.

The band hails from North Carolina, and their sketches of smalltown life are like blurry musical Polaroids that give you hints of what really went down. Townies, for example, recalls a high school friend whose unhindered personality (and sexuality) led to nasty rumours. “I get it now,” Hartzman sings, “you were 16 and bored and drunk, and they were just townies.”

There are flashes of black humour, too. You know you’re in for something with a song title such as Phish Pepsi, and over a sprightly jam band-style backing, Hartzman reminisces about an old friend: “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede, two things I now wish I had never seen.” She adds that the last time she saw this person was in a livestream of a funeral. “Looks like you’re holding up alright,” she sings, “but I know it’s sometimes hard to tell.”

Hartzman’s voice is a wonderfully unpredictable instrument that speaks volumes, whether she’s adopting a lilting country tone or a raw alt-rock roar. It has a crack in it, but as Leonard Cohen would say, that’s where the light gets in.

Nothing is too explicit here. Instead, Hartzman is a songwriter who works more in images and on instinct than with linear storytelling. We know that the lead character in Gary’s II lost his teeth due to a baseball bat wielded by someone who he’d apparently aggravated in some way. As for the full backstory, who knows?

One thing we do know: six albums deep, Hartzman still has plenty of stories to tell. And, as she sang on Chosen to Deserve on the band’s last album, Rat Saw God, “We always started by telling our best stories first, so now that it’s been a while, I’m going to tell you all my worst.”

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