Looking at the setlist from Friday night’s show, it might seem unclear why Wednesday were chosen to play an AmericanaFest showcase. For most of the set, Karly Hartzman shrieked, moaned and murmured as if fronting a punk band; the band behind her ebbed and flowed through feedback, sheer noise, and dark, gritty pandemonium.
For the past five years, the North Carolina band has split the difference between scuzzed-up distortion and polished country licks, often playing out these genre differences in real time. Sauntering on stage at the Basement East, the band launched into “Reality TV Argument Bleeds,” a fuzz-laden song that slowly builds from quiet and pensive to loud and buzzy. It’s off their new album Bleeds, out now via Dead Oceans.
Wednesday continued their way through heaviness, playing “Got Shocked,” before turning to “Fate Is…” from I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone. “Come on baby, show me all your smart blood,” Hartzman yelps, referencing Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. The song recapitulates the novel’s plot, in which religious fervor crests in self-abasement and devoted piety. In using that novel as material, Hartzman captures that adolescent immediacy of desire, in which love and loss feel all-encompassing. Memory becomes nonlinear, the past flickers back to life, former lives fade and reappear, and one becomes haunted by a ghost of remembrance. With this impassioned devotion above all, love can feel closer to blind faith or sheer confusion, or maybe even both.
Hartzman’s lyrics follow the same vein of authors like Harry Crews, Larry Brown, and the aforementioned O’Connor, capturing the dark underbelly of the South with a reverent eye. Her prose elevates pedestrian moments to something otherworldly and absurd, as cars crash into overflowing lakes, bodies float down rivers, and “pitbull puppies piss off balconies.” There’s a certain light-heartedness there, but behind that, a dark confusion lies underneath.
“We’re gonna play a song that explains why we’re playing AmericanaFest,” Hartzmann says, hesitating for a moment. “Well, first we’re gonna play another one.” She motions to the crowd, asking for a shot of Fernet, before launching into “Bitter Everyday,” a live debut of the Bleeds single. By the time the song was over, four shots spawned at the front of the stage, which Hartzman passed along to the rest of the band.
“Elderberry Wine” was next: laced with Xandy Chimenis’ backup harmonies and pedal steel licks, it’s perhaps the song that best captures their slower, twangy affections. The song narrates those nascent, sweltering days of summer, spent with someone you haven’t seen in what seems like years. But, just as soon as that song ended, fuzz pedals were engaged and Hartzman turned herself away from the crowd. “We’re learning the song,” Hartzman says. “The whole thing is only three chords.”
Standing next to her, playing a Yamaha Strat copy, is Jake Pugh, affectionately introduced as “Spyder.” He’s a new addition to the live band: up until last year, Jake Lenderman played in the band. Citing his increased commitments to his solo project MJ Lenderman, he stopped playing live with Wednesday but still records with them. Spyder let feedback build before playing “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” a tune off 2023’s Rat Saw God.
“I dare y’all to mosh,” Hartzman says after the song, taunting the crowd. Looking around, it appears that most are industry professionals, in town for the yearly conference on A2IM, sync, and most importantly, the state of Americana music. Standing near the back, their arms crossed with wristbands on. Near the front are younger fans: a smaller contingent that heard about the show by word of mouth. When the band starts playing “Wound Up Here (By Holding On),” it’s the latter that starts throwing shoulders. Hartzmann giggles as the song ends, perhaps because there were only five or six people moshing.
Looking down at the setlist, Hartzmann has a confession. “We didn’t really cater… we didn’t really add much to the AmericanaFest thing,” she says, referencing the heavy, distorted-leaning songs, before talking more broadly about their music, the South, and the invariable forces of governmental oppression that exist in states like Tennessee and North Carolina. “A lot of people that stayed here to fight against are the most passionate people I know. Living here is the most important fucking thing we can do.” she says, then noting her own identity as a Southern Jewish person and the importance of working toward Palestinian liberation. “I’m just proud of anyone who stays down here and fights for what we believe in.” The audience cheered in agreement, as she concluded: “If you disagree, you’re probably at the wrong fucking show.”
For their last song, Wednesday played “Bull Believer,” where scenes of a bullfight and houseparty run coterminous, feelings of disassociation and alienation fluctuate about. “Got him right between the shoulders / and the bull loses blood,” she sings, the crowd milling about. The band meanders through distortion behind her; Chimenis’ knocks his lap steel back and forth. “Finish him,” Hartzman moans repeatedly into the microphone, building slowly from a hushed murmur to something greater than herself.
By the end of the song, she’s screaming unintelligibly, cackling, struggling to be heard behind a wall of sludge. The mosh has spread across the front half of the venue, and those in wristbands thrash back and forth. Above me, a woman in heels crowdsurfs. Whether the college kids in the front, entrenched in their local scenes, the label heads and managers who back independent artists, or those artists on stage, these are the people rewriting the definition of Southern music. In reckoning with the blighted history and unseemly future of the region, they are the ones who fight against opponents that seem too big to conquer; these are the people who will fight the bull until its last breath.