By Avieana Rivera, Music Coordinator
88.9’s favorite midwest-emo indie rock band is back and better than ever with “Townies,” the latest off of their sixth studio album Bleeds.
CATCHIN’ UP WITH WEDNESDAY
Last month, Asheville Indie rock band Wednesday released Bleeds, their sixth, and best album yet. They opened the summer with “Elderberry Wine,” a twangy, strumming, and very upbeat song. Without any closer inspection into Wednesday leading lady Karly Hartzman’s inventive lyricism, the song sounds like a sweet summer ballad. The song opens with a proclamation “sweet song is a long con,” the singer doubting the reality of the good things that come along. Later, the chorus sings “but everybody gets along just fine, cause the champagne tastes like elderberry wine.” Upon first glance, this song sounds like a cheerful tune about making lemonade about lemons, but champagne, an often expensive and celebratory drink tasting like elderberry wine, a sweet drink hiding the bitter and poisonous nature of elderberries, points to something more sinister hiding under the surface.
Even the description “the pink boiled eggs stay afloat in the brine” not only points to Hartzman’s appalachian roots, describing pickled beet eggs, but also describes something gone wrong, as only spoiled eggs float. Hartmzman herself describes “‘Elderberry Wine” as being about the potential for sweet things in life (to become poison if not prepared for and attended to correctly. This sentiment, and the album’s front single, would go to contextualize the rest of the band’s masterpiece, which comes after the breakup of Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman, the band’s guitarist.
After the breakup, Hartzman bears her soul in Bleeds, digging deeper into her past. Bleeds isn’t a breakup album, but a dissection of Hartzman’s life, reaching near and far and bleeding through it all. The rawness of this album is it’s main appeal, and it doesn’t get more vulnerable than teen angst in “Townies”, because no one ever gets over their first heartbreaks, do they?
DIVING INTO THE LYRICS OF “TOWNIES”
If you’re from a small town, you know that the term “townie” refers to a specific type of person. Born and raised in their hometown, never leaving, and never growing up or changing at all. Though the term has multiple regional meanings, this is Hartzman’s reference point, as she revisits the things that happened to her at 16 with the people who are still there, physically in the town, and mentally, at sixteen. The song opens with Hartzman singing “Catchin’ up with the townies, some are gone but most are still around/ the ghosts of them surround me/ hang on tight until they drown” In this song, she’s gone home and caught up with her old friends from high school. Their ‘ghosts’ or past selves, are still there, causing her to regress into her old self, even though she’s moved away and changed.
The rest of the song relives Hartzman’s high school years. Underage drinking, bonfire parties, and relationship gossip. All the things you do in a town where there’s nothing to do. Even though these vignettes of teen gossip are merely retellings of events that have years passed, you still feel Hartzman’s teen angsts coming out as she regresses back into her teen self. As she makes her final proclamations, the guitar comes in heavy, and Hartzman’s raspy vocals turn into screams, letting her anger out once more. The end comes as a final catharsis, with Hartzman attempting to forgive what’s happened, but eventually erupting in another fit of guitar and screams, the biggest one yet, until it all fades away.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR WEDNESDAY?
Hot off of the release of Bleeds, Wednesday is currently on tour across Europe, and will be coming back to the US this spring, stopping at the Roadrunner on April 1st. They’ll be back in Massachusetts playing the Green River Festival alongside some other ‘ERS favorites like Spoon, Geese, The Beths, Lucius and more on June 19-21.
