![]() ![]() ![]() “They’re telling stories about people from around here in a way that makes it seem like they’re worth telling to people outside of where we’re from,” Hartzman says of Drive-By Truckers. These images aren’t exclusive to the American South, but this type of decay does tend to thrive more in regions of economic depression and sweltering humidity.Īs they have with a lot of people south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Drive-By Truckers helped the native North Carolinians of Wednesday grapple with their identity as Southerners who want to shed light on their surroundings, even if it means exposing some of the more unsavory parts. The album is rife with 3D renderings of pungent detritus: ripe breath steaming off the grill of a pickup truck, piss-colored bright-yellow Fanta, rain-rotted houses, sex shops with biblical names. “Nothing will ever be as vivid / as the darkest time of my life,” she sighs on “What’s So Funny,” and she makes that apparent through Rat Saw God. That includes herself, as she fills Rat Saw God with a litany of formative cringe: showing up hungover to work, pissing in the street, going to Jewish summer camp in upstate New York at a “meant to lose your virginity age”-the sorts of things that made Wet Hot American Summer feel like a documentary. “Most people around here, they’re just happy to be immortalized,” Hartzman says. Whether it’s her uncle, the high school friend that ODs on Benadryl, a kid gawking at a dead body in a Planet Fitness parking lot, or Hartzman herself, there’s a glory in their shame, where people play up their most embarrassing moments as a way to prove that they actually exist. If you’ve read a single thing about noncountry rock music from the Bible Belt in the past 20 years, the “duality of the Southern thing” that Drive-By Truckers once coined should be very familiar: “Proud of the glory, stare down the shame.” Throughout Rat Saw God, the Asheville band’s “Southern thing” isn’t a duality as much as it is a dialectical monism. How Caroline Polachek Turned Desire Into an Album of the Year Front-Runner Lana Del Rey in Present Tense He’s actually really into it because he’s an attention whore.” Or maybe she just forgot that oversharing is alive and well with those still on Facebook and that the illicit thrill of others seeing you at your lowest transcends generational boundaries. Take this yarn from “Quarry”: “The kid from the Jewish family got the preacher’s kid pregnant / but they sent her off and we never heard too much more about it.” “That’s my uncle,” Hartzman says, and given the last half of that line, she was justified in her due diligence. Most of those stories are hers to share, but not all. But after digging in her memory banks and old journals to exhume the suburban legends that populate Rat Saw God, she had to clear her samples, so to speak. Karly Hartzman has no issue exposing her own high school humiliations throughout Wednesday’s teenage dirtbag opus Rat Saw God, which arrives later this week. “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” It’s pretty terrible life advice in general, especially if you’re an artist who plans to air out family business for public spectacle. ![]()
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