-=- SHGZ -=- * Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal * ARTIST..: Wednesday ALBUM...: Twin Plagues GENRE...: Indie STYLE...: Indie Rock, Shoegaze, Grunge Pop, Noise Pop, Slowcore YEAR....: 2021 LABEL...: Orindal COUNTRY.: USA PLACE...: Asheville, North Carolina ENCODER.: LAME 3.100 -V0 BITRATE.: 254 kbps avg QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo SOURCE..: CD TRACKS..: 12 SIZE....: 62.26 MB URL..: http://www.facebook.com/WednesdayTheBand/ - TRACKLIST 1 Twin Plagues 4:08 2 Handsome Man 2:28 3 The Burned Down Dairy Queen 3:08 4 Cliff 2:40 5 How Can You Live If You Can't Love 3:02 How Can You If You Do 6 Cody's Only 2:31 7 Toothache 2:39 8 Birthday Song 3:16 9 One More Last One 3:19 10 Three Sisters 2:16 11 Gary's 2:11 12 Ghost Of A Dog 2:24 Total Playtime: 34:02 Wednesday is a five piece out of Western North Carolina and Twin Plagues is their sophomore full length after a handful of EP's and collaborations and a promising full-length debut in 2019. Karly Hartzman takes care of lead vocals and unravels tales of fleeting moments in life and paints a portrait of these events in all their sometimes-horrifying glory. These moments unravel throughout a record that travels between moments of swelling noise/distortion and heartfelt twanging/aching folk that blends so well in the listening experience. Wednesday manage to incorporate so many emotions in new and winding ways, taking you down pathways that lead to delight after delight over these ten songs. "Cliff" is powered by Hartzman's vocals which carry an emotional weight that holds its ground against the whirling pedal steel guitar of Xandy Chelmis and guitar work that leads to a screaming finish. Wednesday work a melody that grabs your attention immediately between the distortion and the slightly abstract lyrics that are captivating and delivered immaculately. The title track is full of thunder and shards of noise laying the foundation for Hartzman's equally soaring and straining vocals and echoing guitars along with Jake Lenderman and Chelmis. The swirling discord comes in waves, making an impact and lending even more muscle to an already furiously pounding instrumental storm. "How Can You Live If You Can't Love How Can You If You Do" is change of pace on this record with its stunning melody aided by swooping pedal steel flourishes and slowly picked guitar lines as Hartman weaves an aching tale. This is a moment of masterful aching beauty, a piece of songwriting that uses space and expertly crafted lyrics. "Ghost of a Dog" is another slower paced yet extremely powerful use of emotions and quiet, almost minimalistic, atmosphere that shows off the nuanced charm Wednesday use to full effect. They tug at the heart in an unfortunate tale featuring a tormenting apparition of the canine persuasion and trauma/grief as Hartzman's voice breaks and cracks throughout. Twin Plagues hones the strength and craft Wednesday have shown on previous releases and shows a band that is hitting the mark on all of its aims. The songwriting of Hartzman has a guile that goes well beyond what one can or should expect from an artist and band that is in a relatively young stage. Wednesday play with the loud/quiet dynamic in an exciting manner, adding their own unique touches and techniques to push their music in new and exciting directions that show themselves in every track. This is a record that will present something different on every listen. There is something here that will have you returning to it over and over again, leaving you with a smile on your face while doing so. * Asheville, NC-based five-piece Wednesday are purveyors of what some have termed "Southern Shoegaze." It's a description that makes perfect sense on their viscerally chaotic second album Twin Plagues. On the one hand you have tracks such as the gloriously propulsive "Three Sisters" combining layers of swirling distortion punctuated by frontwoman's Karly Hartman's sweet plaintive vocals. At other times Wednesday dial back the noise and woozy washes of sound in favor of chiming slide guitars, which is exemplified on the likes of the beautifully bruised alt-country on "How Can You Live If You Can't Love, How Can You If You Do."It's this ability to switch pace from intimate tender Americana to thundering sonic juggernauts that often owe something of a debt to My Bloody Valentine that make Twin Plagues such a compelling and at times unsettling listen. It's not just the dynamic sonic tonal shifts that draw you in, it's also Hartman's ability to finds pain and beauty in the banal minutiae of everyday life. At times her lyrics seem like wispy clouds, barely formed and yet still have the power to convey an atmosphere. Whether it's the surreal image of "the cartoon crucifixion on a ceiling beyond suffering" on the scything "Toothache" or the fading breath of a lover on the bathroom mirror on "Cody's Only," Hartman's succinct lyrics pack a sizable punch. Wednesday's vignettes of small town life-populated by characters such as toothless chain smoker hooked up to an oxygen machine ("Gary's") or "a neighborhood kid with a fucked up buzzcut" ("Handsome Man") often convey an atmosphere of creeping dread and the sense of a search for meaning in world that seems random and indifferent. The album closes with a particularity eerie version of Edie Brickell & New Bohemians' "Ghost of a Dog," which feels a like fitting conclusion to an album that seems to take its lead from chaos and decay, from loss and longing but also of the need to reconnect with the world. * On its second album, the Asheville five-piece goes big and loud, scaling up its shoegaze-indebted sound while frontwoman Karly Hartzman buries an undercurrent of anxiety beneath the clutter. Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman has a crowded head. "I'm honestly trying to forget and move on, rather than hold onto these memories. I'm writing about them to let them go," she once professed. Hartzman wades through these lingering impressions at a slacker's pace in the band's sophomore album, turning heads with each extraordinary afterimage: a burned-down Dairy Queen, an acid-induced window escape that results in a broken foot, the warm breath a lover leaves on the bathroom mirror. On Twin Plagues, the Asheville five-piece goes big and loud, breathing second life into the things (and a dog) that refuse to die, curling secondhand wisps of sound over and under the living world with remarkable, unexpected beauty. Hartzman covers a lot of ground, splitting her time between brash, head-banging lines about the Beach Boys and reverb-drenched moments of intimacy: "At night a stone/Alone/Faking Sleep/I won't fool you," she sings in "One More Last One," a classic shoegaze cut that could have been pulled straight out of Loveless. In Hartzman's universe, even the most callous of objects come alive. The wall cares so much as to wince, while the floor's proximity to her lover makes Hartzman jealous. Meanwhile, Jake Lenderman's animated guitar meets this world head on: A breathing, kicking creature, it squalls all over and piles up heaps of feedback. Fuzzy, distorted riffs are a constant presence on Twin Plagues, layering atop one another two, three times over. Hartzman elbows through the chaos a little like Snail Mail's Lindsey Jordan did on Habit. But while the latter revels in cathartic emotional displays, Hartzman's own feelings are more delicately tucked away. An undercurrent of anxiety runs beneath the clutter. Recurring reminders of a real-life car crash follow the record like its shadow. And as pointed as her writing is, Hartzman frequently shrinks into generality when she writes in the first person. Names turn into pronouns; objects lose their outlines: "Couldn't laugh at it yet/Wasn't far away from it yet," or "There's something moving over me/I want to remember everything." That loss of specificity, rather than dampen the strength of her songwriting, injects another dimension into it-there's a sense that we are catching Hartzman right after the moment of impact, transfixed in a state of shock or paralysis, whether that's in the aftermath of trauma or a heartbreak in which "the pain was kinda wonderful cause it was so complete." That pain, the devastating, ineffable immediacy of it, is perhaps the most striking aspect of the album. Twin Plagues can feel relentless, almost interminable. After all, this is a record haunted by its own becoming. Hartzman's vocals are often submerged underneath the noise completely, crushed by its weight. Occasionally, she breaks through the surface in slower ballads like "How Can You Live if You Can't Love How Can You if You Do," where a folksy twang adds welcomed variation. One might charge, perhaps, that those moments are too few. In "Three Sisters," things start to get lost within the folds of a dense blanket of sound. But the issues on Twin Plagues are minor. Like Amanda, in "Gary's," who was "screaming something at her boyfriend that we could not make out," Wednesday leave behind something-something we'll remember even without all the details. * Indie rock is alive and well with the Asheville, North Carolina band Wednesday. On their sophomore album, Twin Plagues, the quintet turns up the amps and make a glorious guitar fueled album that is driven by vocalist Karly Hartzman. The band still uses their shoegaze skills found on their debut but now takes the distorted fuzz to a new level as both the guitar and Harzman's vocals get a much brighter spotlight. The record actually starts off with what I would consider a continuation of their previous work as the title track is a very heavy handed shoegaze song with its smoldering build up of feedback before Hartzman comes in and helps push the song along. Its whirlwind moments of reverb are the perfect transition as the record moves to the next track. When "Handsome Man" comes on - you immediately hear the group's evolvement. Hartzman is now in the front seat as her vocals hang on their own between the big seesawing riffs. "Burned Down The Dairy Queen" is next and walks a slower pace with a big crashing instrument finish but I hear more early Liz Phair than My Bloody Valentine. These small tweaks to the formula create a much more engaging record compared to their debut. Twin Plagues has a new indie feel to it with lyrics that pull you in as Hartzman fits into a contemporary bunch like Stef Chura, Katie Crutchfield and Courtney Barnett. The guitars can be crushing at times which I really like because Wednesday can flex some serious muscle and the album is better for it. Wednesday shows a bridge between shoegaze and indie rock on multiple tracks here but while on the ballad "How Can You Live if You Can't Love How Can You if You Do" the band inserts a little bit of twang that not only shows another side to the group but is a stand out moment on Twin Plagues. Wednesday is an easy band to get behind if you like your guitars to crunch. The band is extremely confident on all 12 tracks and leave you with the exciting thought that there is more where that came from! * In a long and emotionally exhausting year of being inside (alone, in my case,) I have found myself thinking about mirrors. How to avoid spending too much time in them, most days. Taking inventory of the real, physical self is difficult work, work that I'm not entirely opposed to but work that became immediately more treacherous for me when I had to witness the very real toll that time, modern anxieties, isolation, and boredom were taking on me. It was easier, it seemed, to spiral into a not-so-distant glorious past, to use memory as a tool of both excitement and healing. But, speaking of excitement, I like to stumble towards a band with no agenda, no purpose, uncovering sound almost on accident. This is how I first heard Wednesday. The band came to me and I don't remember how, or why. They simply arrived, as if we'd been traveling toward each other our whole lives. I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in sound, in spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it took me back to an era before the current era, which I'd needed at the time. The past can feel less hellish than the present if we are, sometimes, not fully honest with ourselves. There is the trick of nostalgia that I spend a lot of time playing with in my own writing, and somewhat tormented by in my own living. The very real idea that nostalgia is both a useful tool and also a weapon if it isn't paired with something that approaches a type of rigorous honesty. Which is hard to do, sometimes. My memories flare and fire with only the finest aesthetics of a past that I was certainly in, but I often deem myself as only a secondary character, if even that. Which, of course, lets me off the hook in the name of fluorescence and flourish, in the name of sound and sight. I love Twin Plagues first for its songs, plainly. If you, listening to Wednesday for the first time around or even the second time around, stumble onto this album, I promise you the songs will be what grab you first, beyond any of my foolish high-level emotional theorizing or projections. Every band that loves the pursuit of their craft the way this band does is one to follow, because getting to sit on the sidelines and watch them level up is a real generosity. Twin Plagues is overflowing with hooks, but what most delighted me about the band from the start has taken a leap: they have managed, somehow, to get even better at structuring their noise from one movement of a song to the next. The idea of the "song" itself is flexible in their hands, so much so that each song holds two, or three songs within. This, again, generosity. "Cody's Only" is a ballad until it begins to threaten a storm of volume, and then, in its final act, it becomes something else altogether. "One More Last One" is a shoegaze-y trip that swells and swells until it overflows, but it doesn't stop. It keeps offering and offering and offering. I say "noise," and never in a dismissive sense. Everything has a place, and so much of its place is to serve the true heart of this album, and the true heart of Wednesday's music, which is allowing cracks through which tenderness can enter and exit as needed. Tenderness that, it seems to me, is always wrestling underneath whatever else might be happening on a song's surface. But if I may go back to all of these ideas of nostalgia and our old, tricky, past selves that are, indeed, a part of the house of bricks that make up our present self, what I also hope you, listener, might adore about this album is the exact moment at the start of "The Burned Down Dairy Queen" when Karly sings I was hiding in a room in my mind / and I made me take a look at myself. Because if you, like me, have been avoiding mirrors - both metaphorical and real - this is where the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing bright across the darkness of my otherwise dark and empty chambers. So much of these songs meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have found myself meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the recalibration that this album provided. I was desperate for making myself less blurry in my own memories and reckoning with my full, multitudinous self. The self that was once unkind, or less gentle, or less curious than I am now. I needed this album to remind me to embrace the fullness of my unfinished nature, the years I have lived and - with any luck - the years I have to go. So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows on a comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the volume up when "Birthday Song" gets good and loud and sing-along-able. You might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the ground, and let "Ghost Of A Dog" churn and rattle you to some nighttime realization that you couldn't have had in silence. But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the mercies that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think, too, that it will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of many reflections. All of them deserving patience. * What does "indie rock" even mean? This has been a subject of much contention over the years, especially as the term has come to encompass music neither released on an independent label nor particularly rock-oriented in genre. There's a lot to think about there for people who gives a shit about such distinctions, but the simplest answer is that you know it when you hear it. And to these ears, Wednesday are as indie rock as it gets. Full of hard-hitting, guitar-powered tracks and released on Chicago-based Orindal Records (home of Julie Byrne, Advance Base, Gia Margaret, and Dear Nora among others), Twin Plagues - the new album from Asheville quintet Wednesday - qualifies objectively as independent rock music. But Karly Hartzman's band also taps into a certain ideal of the genre as established in the late '80s and early '90s: shrouded in fuzz yet melodic and approachable, sometimes lackadaisical but occasionally explosive. Think Pavement. Think Sonic Youth. Think Cat Power. Think of that iconic Dinosaur Jr./My Bloody Valentine tour that deafened Gen X hipsters across America, of Yo La Tengo and Liz Phair and the Breeders. You know: indie rock. Bands have been revisiting such foundational indie sounds again for a good solid decade at least, if they ever stopped. At this stage of the nostalgia cycle - after a decade that started with Parquet Courts and Yuck and ended with Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, with no shortage of '90s throwbacks in between - if you're channeling these influences, you'd better be throwing heat. Fortunately, Wednesday have delivered a scorcher. These 12 songs feel dangerously volatile, like the distortion might actually leap out and burn you if you come too close. They're just as weighty when they quiet down, as if burdened with a world-weariness that refuses to dissipate. Chalk it up to Hartzman's vivid, vulnerable writing, as well as the crunching down-tuned guitar riffs she and Jake Lenderman unleash throughout. And save some credit for producers Alex Farrar and Adam McDaniel, who've ensured that everything sounds bracingly visceral and raw. Even songs like "Handsome Man" and "Toothache," so accessible and melodic that you could almost slide them into an old MTV Buzz Bin compilation, course with urgency and barely contained chaos. If Wednesday initially scan as yet another band working in a well-traveled tradition, they quickly begin to stand out for the unique way they swirl disparate aesthetics into that old slacker-rock template. The emphasis varies from song to song: They occasionally edge up to monolithically gloomy alt-metal, as on the absolutely filthy title track; there are frequent doses of shoegaze (best exemplified by "One More Last Time") and its close cousin, noise-pop (behold the gorgeously discordant racket on "Three Sisters"); between Hartzman's baked-in North Carolina twang and well-placed lap steel flourishes from Xandy Chelmis, there's a lot of country in the mix, particularly on sparse ballads like "How Can You Live If You Can't Love How Can You If You Do." * Twin Plagues is the fuzz-fuelled sophomore offering from North Carolina's Wednesday, showcasing them at their genre-hopping best. From the frantic to the bewitching, Twin Plagues 35-minute journey will only leave you wanting more. Rewind back to the late 80s/early 90s and the first time you heard Kevin Shields and his now unmistakable wall of sound (full disclosure: it was another 17 years or so before I would get introduced). Since then, the comparisons to My Bloody Valentine and their peers have been relentless. All it takes is an offset Fender, a fuzz pedal, and a reverb pedal, and suddenly your release is the next Loveless. Whilst many have tried and some have succeeded, few have managed to have that immediate kick to the the stomach in their releases that helps them stand out from the crowd. Step forward Asheville's Wednesday. Following the release of their debut album I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, Wednesday have continued to develop their shoegaze/lo-fi inspired sound, building upon a solid fanbase with a steady stream of single releases. Not content to rest on their laurels, the North Carolina outfit continue to experiment with genres on their latest release, taking things to new levels. -=- SHGZ -=- -=-=-==-=-=- Shoegaze is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the late 80s. The genre is very difficult to define, and it is even more difficult to evaluate music within it. Generally, the genre is characterized by its shimmering vocals, reverberating guitars, and textural distortion that create a tranquil, opaque feeling. ---==--==---