Wednesday
Bleeds
Dead Oceans
By now, almost everyone’s had a taste of “Elderberry Wine” and its woozy, champagne country effects. Written with help from MJ Lenderman and others, its lithe, swaying beauty and lilting warble positions Wednesday’s creative force of nature Karly Hartzman as the rightful heir to Americana queen Emmylou Harris, but the lure of erecting wailing walls of immense shoegazer-grunge guitar is still too tempting for her to ignore.
Critical darlings who tossed Southern rock dirt and drawl into a writhing, massive pit of wrenching, distorted riffs for 2023’s magnificent Rat Saw God and let them fight for air, Wednesday returns with the tender and tumultuous Bleeds. Like its breathtaking predecessor, it makes a strong case for album of the year, Hartzman lyrically setting scenes like a novelist while artfully addressing — head on, no less — such topics as death, lost love, and absence with the poetic honesty of smart, disaffected youth and falling into the arms of lap and pedal steel swoon that often morphs into mountains of nightmarish noise.
Mostly following the same blueprint as before, Wednesday caters to its split-personality whims, with the earthy “Townies” evolving from No Depression twang into a free-for-all of noisy, tuneful catharsis in a candid case study of sexual manipulation and small-town rumor mills. About those “Townies,” Hartzman sings, “The ghosts of them surround me/They hang on tight until they drown.”
It’s no wonder then that she screams her way through the raging overdrive of “Wasp” and doesn’t mind being in the middle of the immersive crunch and squealing chaos of “Reality TV Argument Bleeds,” which counter the grief-stricken piano ballad “Carolina Murder Suicide” and the sunny, softly rolling “Phish Pepsi.” More conventional, melodic indie-rock makes the scene with “Wound Up Here (By Holdin’ On),” the carpet-bombing “Candy Breath,” and “Pick Up That Knife,” a trio of more perfect unions of heartfelt hooks, slow guitar churn and occasional bombast. And it’s all capped off by the hard-luck character sketch “Gary’s II,” an up-tempo, easygoing, alt.-country stumble through life.
Interesting contrasts are everywhere, from the signature soft-loud dynamics to cycling through different genres and varied storytelling, as Wednesday plays hooky from either school or work to reminisce and take in the weird local color. If it Bleeds, it leads.
