“I always did wonder how your teeth stayed so nice / when the only thing you drink is Pepsi”
These lines have stuck with me since the first listen. They’re the final lines on the final song of Bleeds – the outstanding new album by the North Carolina band Wednesday. The song, “Gary’s II”, is a somber story that bounces alongside the twangiest melodies in the band’s catalog to date. Gary, falsely mistaken to have slept with someone’s wife, gets a bat to his face and then spits out his teeth. The next day, his remaining ones are removed for dentures. This happens to Gary at the ripe old age of 33.
The song highlights everything that makes Bleeds one of the most evocative albums of the year: violent, sympathetic, ominous. The Americana guitar strumming and somber pedal steel only press on the dread. I’m reminded of the climax of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or the shocking season 3 Mad Men episode “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency”. These moments are anchored in American history and the horrors that have always undercored it.
They’re also kind of funny, as long as you don’t imagine the horrors happening to you.
Bleeds is the indie rock album that meets our moment, delivered by one of the best bands in the game. If 2023’s Rat Saw God saw Wednesday roll their alt-country sensibilities into their established lane of heavy, grunge and shoe gaze-inspired rock, Bleeds pulls them further in both directions. This album is at times harder (“Wasp”), at times jauntier (“Phish Pepsi”), at times moving between these extremes within the same song (“Pick Up That Knife”), and all the time underscoring the bizarre realities of southern small-town life.
These extremes snap into focus when considering the band’s approach to their sixth studio album: press materials frame Bleeds as a collage. Song titles like “Phish Pepsi”, “Carolina Murder Suicide” and “Gary’s II” read like reminders jotted onto Post-Its. The album moves from the gritty rock of opener “TV Argument Bleeds” to the off-kilter twang of “Townies”. Students of indie rock history might first find comfort in the latter, which is reminiscent of Pavement’s biggest hits (think “Harness Your Hopes”). Yet while Malkmus often met his stream of consciousness imagery with a tongue-in-cheek wiseassery, Hartzman offers no such relief. Her singing about her home-townies, both the past and present, beams with affection but also hints at exhaustion (“I never yelled at you about it cause you / died”). The song ends with dirty, see-sawing riffs and Hartzman’s wailing along for the ride.
She arrived at the studio armed with demos that the band used as foundations to flesh out the album’s 12 tracks. The approach paid off tremendously: never have Hartzman and bandmates Xandy Chelmis, Alan Miller, Ethan Baechtold, and MJ Lenderman sounded so cohesive. Single “Pick Up That Knife” opens with Hatzman’s fluttery vocals over bright strums before falling into ominous fee, fi, fo, fum riffs. The song is among the album’s best, moving between noisy guitar clatter and unsettling country drawl. “They’ll meet you outside,” Hartzman sings, and then screams, lamenting the loss of the person she just buried: the seven stages of grief pushed through a series of rueful cries.
“Phish Pepsi” embraces jammy rock that details a night getting high with her old friend. She’s also stuck watching a Phish concert and Human Centipede – “Two things I wished that I had never seen.” The line is the funnest on the album, but you can’t exactly imagine her having much fun. Even while taking hits of marijuana from a Pepsi can underneath a Christmas tree, she’s trapped. The tinny backing male vocal, the one that mimics her every word, only tightens the grip.
This is to say that, on Bleeds, Hartzman delivers a masterclass on visceral lyricism. It’s one thing to hear about a bar fight and another to imagine someone in a full body cast. It’s one thing to hear about a drowning and another to imagine their dirty jersey hung up in a trophy case. There’s the dentist who winces at Gary’s gums and a canary that shrieks, screams, and spits. While she’s never shied from imagery, the musical peaks and valleys of Bleeds make them more urgent. Rat Saw God highlight “Chosen to Deserve” detailed a grim story of a near-overdose, but the song’s anthemic, empowering guitars acted like a tonic. On Bleeds, we have “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)”, a dreary track built upon murky melodies and Hartzman crying that feels like survivor’s remorse.
Bleeds’ softer moments are no less brimming in anxiety. The alt-country “Elderberry Wine” is dressed up in the cozy warmth of a bonfire, while backing vocals reinforce a sense of camaraderie. Yet the opening line, “Sweet song is a long con”, feels like a premonition. The album’s penultimate track, “Carolina Murder Suicide” plays like an anti-ballad; Hartzman’s vocals cut through the slow, heavy riffs as dense as fog, detailing a burning house while watching from a sticky leather chair.
The Mad Men episode “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency” offers more than dark jokes and provocative pacing; set in the summer of 1963, the episode doubles as a foreshadowing of the JFK assassination. Similarly, it’s impossible to separate Bleeds from the current context. North Carolina is a perennial swing state and one of seven that decided last year’s American presidential election (all seven went red). Many of the unlucky characters in Bleeds are innocent or, at least, victims of a severe overcorrection. Does someone causing a ruckus while high deserve to be beaten to death? (The alternative, being sent home in a full body cast, doesn’t sound much better.) The man who drowned wasn’t granted his happy ending; context clues hint that he may have won the lottery just before his death. It’s telling that the son who escapes his father’s wrath on “Carolina Murder Suicide” is a known squirrel killer: Hartzman knows all too well that the cycle of violence will continue.
And sure enough, that violence comes back as a bat to Gary’s face. That Hartzman is telling us her landlord’s story as told to her only adds to its immediacy. We, the listeners, are only a degree of separation from songs that carry the weight of parables, crafted by a band at the top of their game. These American tales are sad, and maybe even a little funny.
Until they happen to you.
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