Details: Wednesday "Rat Saw God" Black, or, Purple vinyl LP, or Digipak CD (2023, Dead Oceans). New stock, sealed.

Description: "A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American South, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing scuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.

Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front-yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a cornfield. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything."

Grade: M (new stock)

TRACK LISTING SIDE A:

A1. Hot Rotten Grass Smell
A2. Bull Believer
A3. Got Shocked
A4. Formula One
A5. Chosen To Deserve

TRACK LISTING SIDE B:

B1. Bath County
B2. Quarry
B3. Turkey Vultures
B4. What's So Funny
B5. TV In The Gas Pump

CD TRACK LISTING:

1. Hot Rotten Grass Smell
2. Bull Believer
3. Got Shocked
4. Formula One
5. Chosen To Deserve
6. Bath County
7. Quarry
8. Turkey Vultures
9. What's So Funny
10. TV In The Gas Pump