By Walden Green
Copyright pitchfork
Two years of non-stop touring have made Hartzman a stronger, more expressive singer. She wrote the hardcore thrasher “Wasp” so the band would have something to play after Rat Saw God’s “Bull Believer,” then taught herself how to scream it every night without ruining her voice. Her pained yelps on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” could be those of a wounded fox caught in a trap, gnawing off its own leg to escape. But Hartzman’s greatest asset remains her empathy, perhaps inherited from her mother, a social worker for teen moms. She’s the source of “Wound Up Here”’s “pitbull puppy pissin’ off a balcony” line, which gets paired with the image of weeds growing “into the springs of the trampoline.” It’s one perfect couplet among dozens: “Threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show/In a bottle spit dip and tell dirty jokes,” or, “Grocery store sushi/You’re chopping ketamine with a motel room key.” After a career of comparisons—knowingly invited—Hartzman has become the original.
Bleeds takes a relationship that crammed work and life into close quarters and burns down the whole building. “Carolina Murder Suicide” is all the promises of “countrygaze” made manifest, a pile of dry kindling that grows to a roaring inferno. The real-life case of South Carolina’s Murdaugh murders offers Hartzman a safe distance from which to contemplate—maybe even fantasize over—the possibility of mutual self-immolation. On 2021’s Twin Plagues, she quoted James Baldwin, asking “How can you live if you can’t love? How can you if you do?” “Chosen to Deserve” answered one half of the question. Aching, gossamer-thin, “The Way Love Goes” reckons with the other. “You have seen me angry, I know it’s not been easy,” Hartzman intones, “and I know it can’t always be.” She exhales, shrugs. She’ll live.
Despite the rupture at their center, Wednesday have never sounded more like a band you want to be in. Hartzman and Lenderman chose not to tell the other members about the breakup during recording sessions, but lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, drummer Alan Miller, and bassist Ethan Baechtold must’ve absorbed the airborne event in the room, transmuting it into the creeping, loud-quiet-loud tension of opener “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” and “Townies”’ nitroglycerine chorus. The first act of “Pick Up That Knife” vacillates between jackhammering grunge riffs and Hartzman’s desperate chipperness as she tries to keep up a smile, vowing to one day “kill the bitch inside my brain.” Then the bottom drops out, and “Pick Up That Knife” mutates into a magnificent country rock anthem. “They’ll meet you outside,” Hartzman warns, first fearful, then giddy, then downright ecstatic, as jet-thruster guitars kick in and carry the song off into the sunset.
