Spectreview: Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Released: August 13, 2021

Emo
(Shoegaze)
(Alt-Country)

-LIGHT SLATE BLUE-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

I used to spend time out in Wisconsin. One summer trip, every year, all to see Mom’s side of the family until my last remaining grandparent died when I was seventeen. I remember getting off the plane and feeling the heat swaddle me like a blanket. My mom’s parents had a house overlooking a river in Shawano, and before I hit my teens I used to play in the grass and wait for my uncles to get their fishing stuff together so we could row out across the algae and into the sand bank where it was shallow enough for even a scrawny kid like me to stand. In the musty lower floor where I’d always sleep they had a pool table without any cues, so my brother and I would lay all the balls out and roll them at each other until one victor remained.

When I got older, I remember, that childhood frolicking had been replaced by sheer boredom. With no friends and nobody to relate to besides my cousins – all of which were in their early twenties at least – I used to sit around with a Game Boy and watch TV while tornado warnings wailed outside and the sky turned green. Sometimes I’d get to sip on a warm beer slipped past watchful eyes.

Heat, boredom, and death: that’s all I really remember about the state. Maybe that explains why I connect with Twin Plagues so deeply, but something tells me I wouldn’t even need that specific connection considering how Wednesday’s third record is so intertwined with the process of warped memory. Even the awkward inland empire I maintained during my teenage years in Massachusetts could have easily been soundtracked by Karly Hartzman and her band. Suffice it to say this is the record I had hoped Wednesday would eventually put out when I first listened to I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone: something that capitalizes even further on their mix of shoegaze and country and emo, where Hartzman could take her incisive rumination on flyover teenage life to new heights.

While the familiar, evocative smear of the former record is scrubbed off a bit in favor of a harder-hitting sound, the band’s signature style evolves on songs that explore its natural borders. Xandy Chelmis’ lap steel guitar, smoky and half-lit, curls around the gentle yearning of “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do”; embers float around “The Burned Down Dairy Queen,” on which Hartzman stretches out the title as if writing as much meaning out as possible; “One More Last Time” invokes My Bloody Valentine about as perfectly as anything I’ve heard in a long time, right up to its octaved vocal duet. Slower moments, like the eulogizing “Cliff,” are balanced by poppier ones, like brilliant pair of singles “Cody’s Only” and “Handsome Man.” Ironic to the inspiration, not a dull moment passes.

Ever since I discovered the band I’ve been fascinated by the way Hartzman conjures images in ways that perfectly replicate how the chaotic adolescent brain pulls significance out of everything. It doesn’t matter what you did when you were that age – I certainly didn’t do drugs or have friends or live in North Carolina – because her words mingle with your own memories, intertwining with them effortlessly. You get as much profundity out of lines like “trees cut around the telephone wire” and “toothache sky is about to rain” as you wish. The point is the processing, and processing happens a great deal over the course of the record. People leave, pets die, old lingering feelings refuse to be doused by the temperature of the shower or the passing of days lying in bed. So much of our teenage years are spent just learning how to deal in some form or another, and on Twin Plagues Wednesday bring us back to that process, cutting close to the bone and coming out clean. It’s yet another fantastic offering from a group of certified talents.

Recommended for vomiting four times, flushing once.