We dated for six years; we were best friends; we watched each other grow up. We had broken up a month ago. I’m poking roadkill with a stick. Making it twitch.
Yeah, all you voyeuristic lovers of Fleetwood Mac style inter-band drama will love how singer Hartzman broke up with guitarist Jake “MJ” Lenderman during the making of this album. I’m not going to write about that, because I don’t know these freaks and I don’t want to speculate on what sordid, perverse shit that these big celebrities are into. Yet, if Jake Lenderman wrote a Tweet ten years ago that I really objected to, I’d probably get a good 2k words complaining about it? I’m difficult to predict, I’ll accept that.
Hey, hey, hey! I didn’t post that photo to make a cruel joke! I have never made a cruel joke on this website, and don’t intend to start now! I have never made any joke! I take all of this far too seriously! If you’ve ever found anything on this website amusing, then that was entirely unintended, and what you’re actually doing is laughing at me struggling with my evidentially moribund mental capacity. So, way to be ableist, jerk.
In the nicest possible sense – because I love everyone involved in making both works of art – I do kind of think of Wednesday as the musical, Appalachian version of This Country and its depiction of the Cotswold’s. Sure, the geographical and cultural differences mean that Wednesday are singing less about scarecrow making competitions, Bounties, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and shopping trips to Swindon, and more about Juggalos, Afrin, Phish concerts and murder suicide. But both Wednesday and This Country deal in artistic expressions of the often humorous attempts of people from small towns to escape the mindnumbing drudgery of being amongst their countries forgotten people. Pharrell Williams is nodding along in recognition now, as a fellow member of the lumpenproletariat.
I was just about done with Wednesday after ‘Rat Saw God‘. It was their best album, and I really liked it, but it only snuck into 2023’s list at #38, and the vibes were definitely telling me that their Gold Star Artist status was hanging on by a thread. Earlier that year, I has gone to see a Little Simz show that blew my tiny cock off, then the very next night gone to see Wednesday give a performance so dull that I left halfway through, realising that there wasn’t a song that I was particularly looking forward to. I really started to question my continued attention, did this band really have ‘it’??:
I thought I might be done with Wednesday this year, at least in a sense. There’s obviously long been a lot of affection for them since I was the first person to write about them online (prove me wrong?), and they are officially a Gold Star Artist.. But 2023 is the year I’ve started to only list the albums that were truly exceptional that year, and to be honest the band’s previous – ‘Yep, Definitely’ (#48 in 2018), ‘I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone‘ (#53 2020) and ‘Twin Plagues’ (#66 in 2021) – would probably not make that cut if it were applied at the time. Well, maybe ‘Yep, Definitely’, but only because that’s no longer available to purchase or stream and I want to keep advertising the fact that I will sell a digital copy for only $2mil. ‘Rat Saw God’ is better than anything they’ve done before, but still not spectacular.
Then, holy shit, they did something pretty spectacular.
‘Bleeds’ is the best thing the band have done by quite a distance, and even in a year with much increased competition and the much lauded 2025 Tax™ very much in play, they release an album good enough to almost make the top 20.
There are no great changes to the sound, no real sonic evolutions or massive obvious upgrades to the Wednesday of old, but the band are just astronomically tighter; Hartzman’s vocals are more confident and expressive but not improved in such a way that she loses her unique talents; the songs are just fucking better. Completely counterintuitively when you consider the break-up, the band sound more together and more in synch than ever before. This album sounds like it was a fucking blast to record!
Wednesday, I apologise. You’ve truly earned your place at this table, and you are now officially in ‘The Big Leagues’. Oh, and you might wanna get on iPlayer for ideas for lyrics if you’re stuck.
2023 #38 (+15), 2020 #53, 2018 #48, 2021 #66
At least three albums, all entered into Necessary Evil, you know what that means:
Yep, I’m having that. The little people weren’t as impressed, only giving it 77
Necessary Evil 
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