Wednesday
Bleeds
DEAD OCEANS
We’ve all seen that one true-crime documentary: The victim’s family is sitting there sobbing, explaining through tears that she was the captain of the cheerleading team, that she was at church every Sunday. These things—these violent, tragic, fucked-up things—they just don’t happen to a girl like that. They just don’t happen in a town like this. But they do.
Wednesday distills this small-town gore and shock factor on their latest record, Bleeds. The Asheville-based band delivers a record that feels so Southern gothic that you can feel the Bible thumpers cringing at vocalist/guitarist Karly Hartzman’s lip piercing. Its lyricism thrives on hyper-specific details—chopping up ket with a motel room key, a murder between Broadways and the ramp to 23—that stop you dead in your tracks, because even if you can’t remember the exact moment in your own life that it invokes, you remember exactly how it felt. They tap into a primal emotion in their music that’s overwhelming and disconcerting in a way that can be blindsiding. The visceral walls of sound they construct on tracks like “Bitter Everyday” after being met with the sweet sentimentality of “Elderberry Wine” is disarming; or the twang of “Phish Pepsi” being followed by the guttural screams and shredding on “Wasp.” It’s almost frightening to see the way they manipulate memory to suit the mood.
Still, the sentimentality is undeniable. Their “creek rock” is the equivalent of blowing through your paycheck made out to cash, of running into your childhood best friend at the gas station where your boyfriend with a neck tattoo is buying scratch-off tickets. Their bootgaze feels like the buzz from the beers you stole from your stepdad starting to wear off at a varsity game; it’s the “smack on the ass at the back of a dream” that Hartzman references on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On).” The blistering intro to “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” buzzes in your eardrums and suddenly you don’t feel so cool as you’re suddenly instilled with a sense of chaos, shame, and self-reflection, if not also a hint of redemption. It’s all a part of you, but sometimes you can’t figure out how the pieces fit together.
Even when Wednesday keeps their subject at a distance, like on “Carolina Murder Suicide,” it feels less like the rumors that circulate as a product of boredom in a town of 400 people and more like a way to contemplate the gentle devastation we stare down on a daily basis. As Hartzman describes the crime scene with detachment, she lands on details like a twirling baton outside and the look in a daughter’s eyes when “her dad pulled that Tacoma in the gravel drive.” It’s not the event itself that seems to shatter her—instead, over gentle keys, she fixates on her own thoughts, almost as if she’s removed from the violence that’s just unfolded. “And I wondered if grief could break you in half,” she contemplates.
That’s the thing about Wednesday: Beyond the camo print and target practice there’s a real tragedy. We all have our own tragedies, things that make you taste metal from the sickening surprise you stumble into. It’s what sneaks in after the drawl of “Townies” fades out. It’s the reason why those details make your spine tingle, make your hair stand on end, make you stare blankly on the subway thousands of miles away from any place in America where Carhartt is worn for a reason. It’s the fact that we’re the family in the murder documentary. We’re sitting there like a deer in headlights saying there’s just no way this could happen to a person like me in a place like this.
But it does. Bleeds feels like proof that it did.
