LABEL: Dead Oceans
VINYL RELEASE DATE: 4/7/2023
ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: 2023
VARIANT: Purple Vinyl LP

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory,a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate momentsthat somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector asmuch as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. RatSaw God, the Asheville quintets new and best record, is ekphrastic butautobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the albums tentracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummerAlan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine tominutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurlingsomewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classiccountry twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzmans voice slicingthrough the din.

Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretchin Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time onan iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddledwith broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with brokenand rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu.Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field.Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plasticwater bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strangesentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South humsalive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high schoolfootball games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. Itsnot really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inkyvoid somehow you see everything.

The songs on Rat Saw God dont recount epics, just the everyday.Theyre true, theyre real life, blurry and chaotic and strange which isin-line with Hartzmans own ethos: Everyones story is worthy, she says,plainly. Literally every life story is worth writing down, because peopleare so fascinating.