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.
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