How Drive-By Truckers, Rat-augmented lap steels and electric shocks shaped the alt-country sprawl of Wednesday's Rat Saw God
Rat Saw God, the latest full-length from Asheville, North Carolina quintet Wednesday, stands as a uniquely vital nexus conjoining back-of-the-pickup-breezy country jams with pedal-pushing, primal scream-laden shoegaze. That said, the yarns vocalist/guitarist Karly Hartzman spins throughout the record are also united through near-death experiences.
Take how Chosen to Deserve alludes to teenage overdoses and pumped stomachs. Bath County similarly has someone breaking out Narcan in a parking lot. Then there’s Got Shocked, a true-to-life retelling of the time Hartzman – during a practice for Wednesday guitarist Jake “MJ” Lenderman’s solo project – became an unwilling conductor, owing to the half-assed wiring job in her and Lenderman’s bedroom/rehearsal space.
“We have to make sure that everything gets plugged into one outlet, basically,” Hartzman tells us. “That’s because at an MJ Lenderman practice one time, I was holding my bass – I had all my stuff plugged in – and then our friend Zach asked if could I could hold his guitar while he plugged in his amp. He plugged into a different outlet that had some sort of weird circuit, [and then] I couldn’t open my hands – I was getting continuously shocked by these two guitars.
“It might’ve been 10 seconds, max,” she continues. “I was in pain – I didn’t know why. And then I guess I started screaming. Then everyone figured it out – ‘Oh, she’s getting shocked! We need to turn off the amp.’ It was really scary, but now it’s funny. I’m glad there’s a song about it.”
Structurally, the intro’s jarringly instantaneous accelerando seems to speak to that jolted moment, but during Guitar World’s group Zoom with Hartzman, Lenderman, and lap-and-pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, the band explain this was happenstance.
“If we were being little bastards and making shit up, we would be like, ‘well it represents the sudden, out of control acceleration of actually getting shocked by electricity,” Chelmis says, Hartzman further noting that the ramped-up tempo change took shape following an in-joke around exaggerated count-ins. “I feel like so many decisions are based off joking proposals,” she says, “sometimes it actually works.”
Since Wednesday’s formation in 2017, Hartzman has been working out songs from her front porch with an unplugged Harmony Bobkat – or sometimes the faux-snakeskin Italia Strat copy she bought while working at Asheville’s Heyday Music.
Following the band's genre-splicing 2021 breakthrough full-length, Twin Plagues, the band dove into both sides of their sonic DNA with last year’s Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘Em Up, a covers collection celebrating the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, cult fuzzsters Hotline TNT, and Drive-By Truckers.
When the latter caught wind of Wednesday’s take on their Women Without Whiskey, they sent out a congratulatory tweet and promptly brought the younger band out on the road.
Rat Saw God still has Wednesday channeling the Truckers, even explicitly name-dropping the act in Bath County. And with Chosen to Deserve, Hartzman purposefully went with a wide-open, country rock strummin’ arrangement so she could get as evocative with her storytelling as the Athens, Georgia mainstays.
“It was very obvious that you keep the chords simple to do that,” she explains. “So, that one’s just A-D-E the whole song, pretty much. Writing like that is inherently going to give you space to say more words. And in the Drive-By Truckers way, it’s like – undeniable riff, simple chords. That’s the name of the game for that kind of song.”
Wednesday’s country tunes tend to be in standard tuning, while the rockier side of their spectrum either finds Hartzman going drop D or playing a Danelectro baritone. Lenderman drops his Jazzmaster down a full step for those, but will occasionally throw on a capo.
On tracks like the epic, eight-minute Bull Believer, Chelmis fuzzes up his eight-string Guyatone lap steel through a series of Rats, Big Muffs, or Swollen Pickles, his playfully bizarre accents cutting through the din like a baby hyena. But when it came to his roots-rustic pedal steel work on pieces like Formula One, Chelmis preferred not to muddy up his melancholy sliding.
“The pedal steel stays pretty traditional,” he confesses, “but the lap steel gets wilder."
For his part, Lenderman brings some canyon-sized bending into his solo on Hot Rotten Grass Smell, but often finds himself sticking to a more supportive role within Wednesday. “I think of [steel guitar as] more as a lead instrument,” he says. “I can play lead, but I can also play rhythm much easier than [Chelmis] can.”
Chelmis and Lenderman initially planned to bleed-out in tandem on Rat Saw God’s closing TV in the Gas Pump, overloading the otherwise gently chiming slacker-pop finale with furious waves of feedback.
“Jake and I were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we didn’t play a single note and just made noise for three minutes, while everybody else plays a song?’, Chelmis explains of the sonic subterfuge. “And by golly, we did!”
“I had an 8x10 cabinet and another cabinet [back-to-back] in the room,” Lenderman continues of the overloaded approach he took in the studio. “We were just blasting feedback through the whole song – but I think at the end of the day I went and actually recorded some notes on the song.”
Of the double prank, Chelmis adds, “I found out the next day and was kind of like, ‘What the fuck!’ But then I heard it and it was so tasteful and good. I was really happy some actual guitar was played!”
Rat Saw God is out now via Dead Oceans.
