Rat Saw God

Rat Saw God is the type of kaleidoscopic album that offers up something new to appreciate with each listen. It’s a record worth hearing, recommending, and obsessing over – Google search results be damned.

Pain remains a fertile ground for compelling art, but the brilliance of Rat Saw God lies in how the band also captures the resistant luminance within that pain. The characters in these songs suffer, but Hartzman draws them from places of empathy and honesty.

Finding magic in the mire ‘Rat Saw God’ is an emphatic, uplifting reminder of the privilege of being alive.

Remarkably, the world they create together never curdles into sentimentality. ... Wednesday turn that stabbing pain into triumphant rock'n'roll. [May 2023, p.39]

All of the wobbling between tempos and styles might sound haphazard, but it’s executed with precision. And Hartzman’s snatches of Americana imagery—rain-rotted houses, parking lots, “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta”—ultimately cohere into an evocative portrait of the fringes of American life.

As Hartzman’s lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances.

This is a band operating at their highest, most infectious potency, and the end result is riveting.

Lyrical precision is what makes the record shine, the fact that Hartzman can recall the exact video game, in this case, Mortal Kombat, that someone was playing when her nose started bleeding at a New Year’s Eve party she didn’t even want to be at.

Their commitment to the people they write about and their instincts about crafting music to match make this a stunningly powerful work that may well turn out to be a masterpiece.

Not everything works on Raw Saw God. The rootsy, Southern-fried Chosen to Believe sounds more Hootie than Doobie, though its meditation on love and acceptance saves its pop-leaning misdirection. It's a testament to Hartzman's nuanced lyrical bent, whose articulate observations are intriguing and even funny rather than affected.

At 25, Hartzman’s old enough to romanticize her youth but world-weary enough not to try recapturing it. The space between the two – reckless childhood and cynical maturity – is where Wednesday resides, but they manage to find beauty in it all.

There’s a Flannery O’Connor story collection worth of Southern fucked-up-ness going on here. But Wednesday are just as interested in sucking you in with a walloping guitar banger as they are in freaking you out with their snapshots from the ruralburban coming-of-age abyss. These songs are so catchy you almost don’t notice the body count.

The shrugged shoulder irony of real life places such as the Adam & Eve sex shop or a Southern-themed amusement park give Rat Saw God its substance. The slurred lines of dual guitars and pedal steel that run rampant over most of its course provide the PICC line to serve it up to you.

Rat Saw God is wildly ambitious and easily lives up to the industry hype — Wednesday have succeeded once again in twisting nostalgia and existential dread into a braid of bruising, life-affirming rock music.