“Found out who I was / and it wasn’t pretty / Suddenly it’s a tragic story / But that’s what’s so funny,” Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman sings towards the end of Rat Saw God, a dark and honest album filled with personal stories and inside jokes, and a sort of millennial “theology” that counters much of the purist rhetoric in our country right now.
The Asheville, NC quintet is what happens when punk meets country, with its lap steel overlaid with howling screams, its perfect hookiness followed by key changes that make your head spin. There are back seat make out sessions before teaching Sunday school, a fair share of drugs and the resulting emptiness, sex shops by highways with biblical names. Like Karly sings on the third song, “I got shocked cause the room was on two different circuits.”
It is those two alternate energy sources that seems to dominate the stories told on this album, though it’s not presented in a binary fashion. Like she sings in the song “What’s So Funny,” a humorous and harrowing story about a friend who was stung by a bee while using a chainsaw: “and you dropped it / you amazing / idiot.” Life is this mixture of horror and happiness, degradation and blessings that we do deserve.
“At night I don’t count stars / I count the dark.” And the darkness abounds. Whether it’s the multiplication of chain stores and gas stations in corporate America, or the mob living next store, or the emptiness that comes with giving into your more animal instincts. There’s nothing preachy about this album, and it can be summed up in the title of the record: Rat Saw God.
That is the story content of the record, which is to speak nothing of the electrified, bottled lightning of the music, which is both sweet and menacing in its brilliant sound construction. They are pushing the envelope with their music, bringing punk into the indie realm in ways that, of course, has been done, but perhaps not with such a juxtaposition of beautiful and terrible, before. Particularly by a female front person.
It’s an epic album, helped along by Karly’s dynamic voice and super vulnerable storytelling. “I’m the girl you were chosen to deserve.” If that’s the case, we’re pretty lucky.
Prism Reviews 