Wednesday - Bleeds Review
Bleeds is Wednesday at their most raw and unflinching, a record that stings as much as it soothes.
Music takes time to seep in through the nooks and crannies of a brain before one associates a melody with a moment, warping sounds into a distinct place in time. However, once in awhile, something like Wednesday’s Bleeds comes out: a perfect snapshot of a moment, with its impact immediately self-evident.
In my final London summer before returning home to the US, a melange of modern slacker and country fusion became soundtracked my sweaty, transitory days. Chief amongst those was ‘Elderberry Wine,’ the first single released for this project back in May of this past year -- a lifetime ago. Listening to the dulcet tones of Karly Hartzman’s voice and Xandy Chelmis’s brilliant pedal steel, with its amiable lyrics reflecting on the love you feel on a hot night with peers, it quickly became evident this would be my song of the summer. Ultimately, nothing else came close, and I felt bitter that I had to leave the halcyon setting where “everybody gets along just fine” and return to an uncertain future before hearing it in full.
Somehow, a first listen to an album has never felt more perfect than my experience with Bleeds. I lay in a field near my parent’s house in New Jersey, looking back at my old town and struggling to understand what my life will look like now. “Melting outward like a movie burning from a screen,” Hartzmann sings prophetically on the opener ‘Reality TV Argument Bleeds’ -- something of a title track that sets the tone for what’s to come on the album ahead, establishing what the band describes as the definitive “Wednesday Creek Rock sound.”
That sound is simultaneously too noisy for me to play for my parents, too saccharine and country for my hardcore friends. A unique culmination of a band who knows who they are and reaping the rewards from building a movement over the last decade. It repels those unwilling to dig below its jagged edges, while quickly offering some of the most sincere and true-to-life music being released right now.
Nowhere is this more evident than Bleeds’ second song, the instant classic ‘Townies.’ Anybody returning home to Smallville, USA hears in it an understanding of the country and a true sort of patriotism absent from the toothless “Americana” popular right now. It characterises the persistent hauntings of adolescent ghosts in towns the size of an English county, yet hardly a blip to others on the other side of the state. They’re vast and territorial, filled with people who will share nudes and fade into the leaves, lost to all but a small memory that gets distilled into a haunting phrase: “And I get it now / You were 16, bored and drunk / and they’re just townies.”
By the time the listener approaches its two lead singles, it’s hard not to be sold on the project’s vision. ‘Wound Up Here (By Holding On),’ initially underwhelmed me as a follow-up to the immediately anthemic ‘Elderberry Wine,’ but its tragic narrative of seeing a dead peer’s photo in a trophy case feels crucial within the bigger picture of the record.
Admittedly, the amount Hartzman describes young death and small-town stereotypes does threaten to veer into self-parody at points. However, folk stories are always given credibility by authenticity, and Wednesday seem to have it in spades. Even how they close the album reflects this, displaying two sides of Americana in quick succession: first, the bleak ‘Carolina Murder Suicide,’ describing both an event that is both tragically common in isolated towns that doubles as a portrait of a failing relationship. That this is immediately followed comedic character study of the prematurely dentured Gary (in something of an extended ‘Her Majesty’ epilogue), provides both levity and credibility to the ragtag group of Asheville natives who’ve toured and worked persistently since high school, now finally achieving enough success to make a proper living.
The small-town romances, funerals, and intoxicated indiscretions Hartzman describes is hardly a great deviation from her past work, but the atmospheres deviate where they’d feel one-note in previous works. And more importantly, the unifying backdrop of every track is that of transition, notable given the context of her and guitarist’s MJ Lenderman’s fracturing relationship during its composition. This is most notable in ‘The Way Love Goes,’ detailing the insecurity nascent to when interactions with a partner swap between extremes of love and hate, trust and paranoia. That it’s one of the softest and most restrained songs the band’s ever performed (with solely vocals and an acoustic guitar) makes it more eerie, making it easy to appear as a love song to the unobservant.
These soft reflections coexist with much angrier ones, be it a truly punk belter in ‘Wasp’ where Hartzman screams about being “castrated in [her] mental death” or ‘Candy Breath,’ which utilises arguably the most effective expression of noise the band has performed. Its tense “wah”s builds to pivotal explosions where it almost sounds like Hartzman is spitting at the ground as she sings about shame, tire fires, and pleasureless midnight snacks in total darkness, save a fridge light. These tonal shifts might seem jarring, but the whiplash is perfectly effective in evoking the intended mood: changing seasons, something beautiful coming to a close.
Yet despite having a song entitled ‘Bitter Everyday’ in the back half of the album, these observations feel more objective than angry. It’s simply a persistent lump in the throat; time passes and your hometown will never feel quite comfortable again, but we still keep coming back. Hartzman understands there’s as much pleasure as there is pain in looking at the past and that the realization that something is ending can be as beautiful as it is tragic. Moments like ‘Pick Up That Knife’ where you can almost hear the somber grin on her face as she does everything she can to criticize someone, without ever being able to successfully feign true hatred.
Maybe that person is Lenderman, maybe it’s just narrative, but his comparatively muted presence on the album is undeniable. It also makes it even more notable that ‘Phish Pepsi’ is a re-recording of their old duet. The new version manages to increase fidelity, without sacrificing charm by adding something different: namely country instrumentation and an omission of Lenderman’s harmony. Considering he sings on other Bleeds tracks, his removal from a song describing 20-somethings falling in love is as brilliant as it is stark. And it certainly feels purposeful that it succeeds ‘Elderberry Wine,’ which describes the better days of a relationship and functions largely as a duet between their two voices.
Bleeds feels like the culmination of a moment: the most honest portrayal of what it feels like to be in your 20’s concurrently with the 21st century. While it may paint the same scenarios as the group’s past work, it feels like a perfect conclusion to all this scene has been building to. It embraces an inevitable end of this period of time and a closed curtain to objective youth with a jagged edges masking its bleeding heart.