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 band’s acclaimed record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman builds a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.
The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”
But the thing about Rat Saw God – and about any Wednesday song, really – is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.
Cryogeyser is a project of Shawn Marom out of Los Angeles, California. The band has had a with a different mix of characters in the rhythm section but has always had the consistent character of Hunter Martinez’ bass parts. Cryogeyser as a project has released 2 albums (Glitch and a double album: Love is Land/timetetheredtogether), produced by Jeremy McLennan, Stella Mozgawa, and Jack Shirley respectively. With one foot in the shoegaze scene but also a clear insistence on vocal driven melodies and classic indie rock/grunge tropes, Marom has recently started to take control of the sound in a more intentional way, planning to start recording a new album later this year, one drenched in intuition but this time with a big intention. Cryogeyser loves to play music and make new friends.
